Although state agencies are required by law to assess their consumers' satisfaction with vocational rehabilitation (VR), each state uses its own instrument to measure satisfaction. This not only makes comparisons across states impossible but also means that the quality of these instruments varies widely from state to state. As with other…

Background: Athletics programmes for secondary schools include a variety of skills, knowledge and cognitive abilities, which are currently assessed through written, practical, oral and/or video-based tests. Skills are traditionally taught in practice-based sessions, while the knowledge aspect is often reinforced in class-based sessions with…

There has been a wealth of investigation into the use of online multiple-choice questions as a means of summative assessment, however the research into the use of formative MCQs by the same mode of delivery still remains patchy. Similarly, research and implementation has been largely concentrated within the Sciences and Medicine rather than the…

The Bayley Scales of Infant Development II (BSID-II) and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition (WISC-III) are frequently used across cultures in standard assessment batteries for learners between 6 and 17 years of age, respectively. Responses of American Indian students on the BSID-II and WISC-III were examined for patterns of…

This article describes the development of an English spelling measure designed to assess the progress made by Spanish-English bilingual children from Grade 2 to Grade 5. Different stages of developing the measure are described, such as selecting the focus features, the prepilot and pilot phases, and the operational version. Two underlying…

The purpose of this study is to analyze items that exhibit gender-related Differential Item Functioning (DIF) in Mathematics in Jordan. Data was taken from the TIMSS 1999 of Jordan, which includes responses of 5, 299 eighth grade students. Mantel-Haenszel (MH) DIF procedure was applied to 124 multiple-choice items. The results showed that 37 items…

This study investigates whether the practice of answer changing on multiple-choice questions (MCQs) is beneficial to Gulf Arab students' overall test performance. The proficiency exam used in this study is the Michigan English Language Institute College English Test - Grammar, Cloze, Vocabulary, Reading (MELICET-GCVR), which was developed using…

The idea that validity should be considered a property of inferences, rather than of assessments, has developed slowly over the past century. In early writings about the validity of educational assessments, validity was defined as a property of an assessment. The most common definition was that an assessment was valid to the extent that it…

In this technical report, the authors describe the development alternate forms of three types of early literacy measures as part of a comprehensive progress monitoring literacy assessment system developed in 2006 for use with students in Kindergarten through fourth grade. They begin with a brief overview of the two conceptual frameworks underlying…

This curriculum guide has been developed as a resource for teachers (especially in North Carolina) to use in planning and implementing a competency-based instructional management technology program in their schools. The guide contains three main section. The first section contains introductory materials and a course blueprint that lists the…

When tests contain few items, observed score may not be an accurate reflection of true score, and the Mantel Haenszel (MH) statistic may perform poorly in detecting differential item functioning. Applications of the MH procedure in such situations require an alternate strategy; one such strategy is to include background variables in the matching…

Analyses based on fitting item response models to data from the College Board's Advanced Placement exams in Chemistry and United States History indicated that the constructed-response portion of the tests yielded little information over and above that provided by the multiple-choice sections. These tests also allow examinees to select subsets of…

The guide is intended for teachers who must construct language tests and for other professionals who may need to construct, evaluate, or use the results of language tests. Most examples are drawn from the field of English-as-a-Second-Language instruction in the United Kingdom, but the principles and practices described may be applied to the…

The feasibility of constructing test forms with practically equivalent cut scores using judges' estimates of item difficulty as target "statistical" specifications was investigated. Test forms with equivalent judgmental cut scores (based on judgments of item difficulty) were assembled using items from six operational forms of the…

Measures of the robustness of disease class-specific diagnostic concepts could play a central role in training programs designed to assure the development of diagnostic competence. In the pilot study, the authors used disease/sign-symptom conditional probability estimates, Monte Carlo procedures, and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to create…