Explores one school district's reconsideration of a revised grading policy assigning differential point values to letter grades earned, based on course difficulty. A grading system called "Windows" was designed to preserve the advantages of a pass/fail system. Transcript analyses disclosed unpredictable shifts in class rank, penalties for…

The mechanisms of perceptual learning are analyzed theoretically, probed in an orientation-discrimination experiment involving a novel nonstationary context manipulation, and instantiated in a detailed computational model. Two hypotheses are examined: modification of early cortical representations versus task-specific selective reweighting.…

In many countries, an athlete's performance at sporting competitions is often used as part of the selection criteria for entry into college. These criteria could be biased depending upon the procedures utilized by the authorities in a particular country. The purpose of this study was to calibrate, by using the Rasch rating scale model, the…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia are distinct developmental disorders. Method: Study 1 investigated the overlap between SLI identified in kindergarten and dyslexia identified in 2nd, 4th, or 8th grades in a representative sample of 527 children. Study 2 examined…

As attention shifts to how districts allocate resources to schools, student weighted allocation has emerged as an alternative to traditional staff-based allocation policies. Student-weighted allocation uses student need, rather than staff placement, as the building block of school budgeting. This article examines how the shift to student-weighted…

This paper introduces criterion-referenced tests (CRTs), compares them with norm-referenced tests (NRTs), discusses how they can be evaluated and revised, and presents a study of an actual class and textbook test evaluation using CRTs. NRTs have dominated testing methodology since the mid-1970s; an example is the Test of English as a Foreign…

Testing guidelines based on teachers' experience and on a review of literature concerning approaches to the testing of oral second language skills, are presented in this paper. Considerations in developing the test included coordination with the syllabus, choice of format, grading, and administration. Suggestions are offered from the practices of…

This paper illustrates the transformation of a raw data matrix into a matrix of associations, and then into a factor matrix. Factor analysis attempts to distill the most important relationships among a set of variables, thereby permitting some theoretical simplification. In this heuristic data, a correlation matrix was derived to display…

A survey of college sophomores (N=671) at Georgetown University (District of Columbia) was conducted to measure the extent of their participation in intellectual pursuits and other complementary or competing activities. Principal components analysis was used to identify questions which measured underlying tendencies, and weighted indexes were…

To minimize the effects of systematic differences in raters' standards of clinical competence, a handicapping system was applied to the ratings made by fourteen preceptors of 128 junior year medical students in a 6-week psychiatry clerkship at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. The handicap of a preceptor was the difference between…

This handbook presents instructions for implementing a confidence testing program in technical training situations, identification of possible areas of application, techniques for evaluating confidence information, advantages and disadvantages of confidence testing, time considerations, and problem areas. Complete instructions for "Pick-One" and…

Evidence on how the psychometric properties of verbal and quantitative academic aptitude tests are affected when item options are weighted using rather simple conceptual procedures is presented. This is discussed in connection with the scoring methods used on the Graduate Record Examinations. (DG)

Effects of logically weighting incorrect item options in conventional tests and different scoring functions with confidence tests on reliability and validity were examined. Ninth graders took conventionally administered Verbal and Mathematical Reasoning tests, scored conventionally and by a procedure assigning degree-of-correctness weights to…

The regression model can be used to rank resident candidates prior to interview by systematically assigning weights to the information in the transcript and then summing the weights. Much of the judgment of a residency selection committee can be incorporated in a regression model. (MLW)

The relative magnitudes of R-squared values computed through multiple regression models using grade equivalent scores, raw scores, standard scores, and percentiles as both predictor and criterion variables are compared. Grade equivalents and standard scores produced the highest R-squared values. (Author/JKS)