In this issue of Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research and Perspectives, Schilling et al. are explicit about the centrality of assessment design and development and psychometric analysis in validation. Schilling and colleagues, Kane (2004, 2006), other contemporary validity theorists and practitioners, and their predecessors typically discuss…

A total of 278 children at Time 1 (144 male and 134 female) from School Years 1 and 2 in the United Kingdom serve as participants. The children complete self-rated scales of school adjustment, and their teachers complete the Teacher Rating Scale of School Adjustment (TRSSA) twice across a 1-year period. At Time 1, children's performance on…

The Women in Science Scale (WiSS) was first developed in 1984, and is still being used in contemporary studies, yet its psychometric properties have not been evaluated with current statistical methods. In this study, the WiSS was administered in its original 27-item form to 1,439 middle and high school students. Confirmatory factor analysis based…

The use of data from student surveys has become a common element of universities' and governments' strategies to assure the quality of university teaching. With the introduction of a new government policy in Australia in 2005, these survey-derived teaching performance indicators now determine the distribution of many millions of dollars of funding…

How can one create a system for university admission that is equitable, valid, and representative of the broad range of abilities that students can bring to university settings? Conventional tests of abilities and achievements are narrow and do not measure the full range of abilities relevant to university and life success. In this article I…

The psychometric properties of a version of the Course Experience Questionnaire revised for students currently enrolled at the University of Sydney, the Student Course Experience Questionnaire (SCEQ), were assessed, gathering students' perceptions on a number of scales, including Good Teaching, Clear Goals and Standards, Appropriate Assessment,…

Many students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing are eligible for a signing accommodation for state and other standardized tests. The signing accommodation, however, presents several challenges for testing programs that attempt to administer tests under standardized conditions. One potential solution for many of these challenges is the use of…

Recent research in cognitive psychology has drawn attention to the important role that students' personal understandings and representations of subject matter play in the learning process. This paper briefly reviews some of this research and contrasts the kind of learning that results in an individual's changed conception or view of a phenomenon…

The development and evaluation of methods for detecting potentially biased items or differentially functioning items (DIF) represent a critical area of research for psychometricians because of the negative impact of biased items on test validity. A summary is provided of the authors' 12 years of research at the University of Massachusetts…

The General Computer Adaptive Test (CAT) of the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) includes three operational sections that are separately timed and scored. A "no score" is reported if the examinee answers fewer than 80% of the items or if the examinee does not answer all of the items and leaves the section before time expires. The 80%…

Setting performance standards is an area that different constituencies see quite differently. The choices of elements for a particular standard depend to a large extent on the purposes the standard is intended to serve. Standards can be used in certification, as predictors, as descriptors, and as motivators. While performance standards indicate…

Attachment styles have been shown to be enduring and influential, and studies of attachment phenomena require scores that are reliable and valid. The present study investigated the psychometric integrity of scores on the Adult Attachment Scale using data from 283 college students. This instrument is an 18-item Likert scale that is an expansion of…

Attachment theory asserts that human beings are innately programmed to seek and form attachments with others. The assumption that the quality of early attachment relationships will be functionally related to subsequent attachment styles and competencies provides the theoretical basis for extending the theory of attachment to the study of adult…

The Quebec Adaptive Behavior Scale (QABS) is widely used in Quebec (Canada) to assess behavior of people with mental retardation in educational, vocational, residential or hospital settings. This study estimated the interrater agreement and test-retest reliability of the QABS. To determine test-retest reliability, the QABS was completed by 27…

Developments in the measurement and theory of creativity are reviewed, and the present status of creativity vis-a-vis psychometrics and theory is explored. The realm of creativity has been a quagmire of definition problems, with creativity variously defined in terms of process or stages. In past eras, creativity was essentially measured by output…