The Work Keys System from the American College Testing Program is an innovative national system that provides a continuous structure for documenting and improving the workplace skills of individuals. By providing individuals with reliable information about their own skill levels and the levels required for jobs, Work Keys can help individuals make…

An ethnographic study investigated conversations during planning meetings and placement rating sessions for selecting and rating freshman composition placement exams. Planning meetings involved the administrative coordinator and two assistants selecting model essays, discussing the rubric, and confirming the final plans for the rating session.…

This report presents results of a fall 1993 survey of 164 adult education agencies in California concerning their placement procedures for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students. The survey had two purposes. First, the information gathered by a questionnaire (appended) was to provide the California department of education with a profile of…

This paper explores common concerns about competency testing as they relate to the certification of high school graduates seeking a diploma in the United States. Competency testing is widespread in the United States, with 40 states engaged in competency testing in at least one grade. In general, and particularly for graduation requirements, the…

Many testing programs include a section of optional questions in addition to mandatory parts of a test. These optional parts of a test are not often truly parallel to one another, and groups of examinees selecting each optional test section are not equivalent to one another. This paper provides a general method based on missing-data methods for…

Examination of the development of the standards documents of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) points to constructivism as the central view of learning that underlies the reform movement in mathematics education. Constructivism is a theory of how learning occurs. It assumes that knowledge is not passively received, but rather…

A qualitative study investigated the test-taking behaviors, knowledge, and perceptions of 20 urban, adult basic education students reading at third to fifth grade equivalency levels. The entire reading comprehension subtest of the Test of Adult Basic Education, levels E and M, was administered under standardized conditions. A combination of…

This paper presents a model of scored cognition that incorporates two types of mental models: models of performance (i.e., the criteria for judging performance) and models of scoring (i.e., the procedural scripts for scoring an essay). In Study 1, six novice and five experienced scorers wrote definitions of three levels of a 6-point holistic…

This collection of student essays provides illustrations of the criteria used to grade the composition portion of the sixth-grade achievement test used in Alberta (Canada). An introductory section describes the procedures for selecting the essays used, establishing scoring norms, and scoring the tests, and offers general comments on the writing…

The usefulness of response latency data for biographical inventory items was assessed for improving the inventory's validity. Focus was on assessing whether weighting item scores on the basis of their latencies improves the predictive validity of the inventory's total score. A total of 120 items from the Armed Services Applicant Profile (ASAP)…

Test data from a large licensure examination were used to investigate the impact of the number of score groups and score group size on the Mantel-Haenszel (MH) alpha statistic. Two kinds of quasi-experimental studies were conducted: (1) baseline MH analyses in which the number of score groups and the ethnicity of each randomly equivalent…

This document presents a series of five papers describing issues in educational measurement. "A Simple Model for Diagnostic Testing When There Are Several Types of Misinformation" directly addresses the diagnostic issue. It describes a simple latent trait model for testing, examines use of erroneous algorithms, and illustrates the…

This guide to Alberta's French 30 standardized test describes the testing program and administration, the test parts, and test scoring for both teachers and students anticipating taking the test. Dates and times of test administration and scoring dates in 1990 are charted. The two parts of the test are described in some detail, including their…

A balanced appraisal of holistic scoring of writing is presented via: examination of the present popularity of holistic scoring; analysis of several weaknesses associated with the holistic scoring method; and recommendations for remedying these weaknesses. Six reasons for the popularity of holistic scoring are: (1) relative lack of expense; (2)…

Computerized adaptive testing procedures (CATPs) based on the graded response method (GRM) of F. Samejima (1969) and the partial credit model (PCM) of G. Masters (1982) were developed and compared. Both programs used maximum likelihood estimation of ability, and item selection was conducted on the basis of information. Two simulated data sets, one…