Under No Child Left Behind, urban school districts have increasingly turned to interim assessments, administered at regular intervals, to help gauge student progress in advance of annual state exams. These assessments have spawned growing debate among educators, assessment experts, and the testing industry: are they worth the significant…

Quality measurement is essential in every form of research, including institutional research and assessment. Unfortunately, most survey research today (both published and unpublished) is lacking with regards to quality measurement. Reporting means and standard deviations based on ordinal measures is an inappropriate, yet widespread practice in the…

In arguing for more comprehensive practice, policy and research considerations of assessment in physical education (PE), this paper outlines and discusses four integrated conditions of assessment efficacy for the development and promotion of productive assessment in PE. These conditions are prefaced by the proposition that quality PE requires the…

This study investigated the effectiveness of role play in a large undergraduate science class. The targeted population consisted of 298 students enrolled in 2 sections of an undergraduate Human Anatomy and Physiology course taught by the same instructor. The section engaged in the role-play activity served as the study group, whereas the section…

In Spring semester 2006, we conducted a study with 50 learners of German to investigate the use of a new measure (Cardenas-Claros, 2005) for research on the field independent/dependent (FID) cognitive style and CALL use. After the measure was administered, students worked on a CALL program for German that logs interaction. This paper reports the…

In this study, psychometric properties of the test of the three-mathematical minds (M3) were investigated. The M3 test was developed based on a multidimensional conception of giftedness to identify mathematically talented students. Participants included 291 middle-school students. Data analysis indicated that the M3 had a 0.73 coefficient as a…

At the Medical College of Wisconsin, a procedure was developed to allow computerized grading and grade reporting of laboratory practical examinations in the Clinical Human Anatomy course. At the start of the course, first year medical students were given four Lists of Structures. On these lists, numbered items were arranged alphabetically; the…

The purpose of the research was to assess the diagnostic efficiency of the Primary Care Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Screen (PC-PTSD) and the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist (PCL) as clinical screening tools for active duty soldiers recently returned from a combat deployment. A secondary goal was to examine the item-level characteristics…

Background: This study assessed the psychometrics of two measures--the "Matson Evaluation of Drug Side-effects" (MEDS) and the "Akathisia Ratings of Movement Scale" (ARMS)--and examined the symptom profile of akathisia in a sample of people with intellectual disability (ID). Method: Sixty-six participants formed three groups of…

Understanding the extent of commitment to and identification with traditional cultural experiences is essential for working with American Indian people (Whitbeck, 2006). The purpose of this study was to determine the usefulness of a practical measure of enculturation for AI people by examining its reliability and validity within the context of…

Absolute standard setting procedures are recommended for assessment in medical education. Absolute, test-centred standard setting procedures were introduced for written assessments in the Liverpool MBChB in 2001. The modified Angoff and Ebel methods have been used for short answer question-based and extended matching question-based papers,…

Criteria had been proposed for assessing the severity of possible test security violations for computerized tests with high-stakes outcomes. However, these criteria resulted from theoretical derivations that assumed uniformly randomized item selection. This study investigated potential damage caused by organized item theft in computerized adaptive…

Confirmatory factor analyses for ordered-categorical measures probed for differential item functioning on a standardized measure of alcohol dependence across Hispanics (n = 834) and non-Hispanic Caucasians (n = 14,001) in a nationally representative survey of alcohol use in the United States conducted in 1992. Analyses investigated whether 30…

The objective of this study is to explore the potential for developing IRT-based working memory scales for assessing specific working memory components in children (8-13 years). These working memory scales should measure cognitive abilities reliably in the upper range of ability distribution as well as in the normal range, and provide a…

This article discusses the evidence for intervention validity of Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) in designing support for students with intensive behavioral needs. Since its inclusion into the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act nearly a decade ago, FBA has been the subject of significant research investigating its use and…