This paper presents the investigation of the psychometric properties of the Graduate Program Self-Assessment (GPSA) questionnaires, developed by the Educational Testing Service, for the evaluation of nursing doctoral education. The data are from the 1984 cooperative program evaluation from 326 faculty, 659 doctoral students, and 296 alumni. The…

A review of the implications for the validity of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) of scientific developments accompanying the revival of cognitive psychology provides insights into the importance of such changes. A distinction can be made between a process-oriented or diagnostic test and an outcomes-oriented test such as the SAT. Since the SAT…

Data from the authors' previous research (1979, 1980, 1987), consisting of responses to five masculinity-femininity (M-F), two esteem, and two social desirability instruments, were reanalyzed. The subjects were 104 male and 133 female college students who completed the: Bem Sex Role Inventory, Personal Attributes Questionnaire, ANDRO instrument…

A historical review of educational literature concerning measurement of cognitive skills is provided, with reference to test construction. Focus is on assessing abilities beyond recall of information. In light of interest in assessing critical thinking in the California Assessment Program, it must be noted that concern with critical thinking is…

This report, prepared by the Delinquency and School Environments Program, describes further interim results of the program's national evaluation of the Alternative Education Program of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). The report is directed primarily to project implementers and to the OJJDP and is organized in two…

The use of a traditional syndrome-classification system for aphasics is examined critically from the different perspectives of medicine and psychometrics. Medicine views syndromes as dichotomous (present or not present) and necessarily indicative of an underlying pathognomic state or process, and psychometrics sees performances as varying along a…

The construction of cognitive tests is largely based on a Thurstonian model of the structure of the intellect, with test content described in terms of loadings on broad constructs called factors. Knowledge of factorial content of a test does not necessarily correspond to knowledge of mental activities elicited by test performance. Modern cognitive…

To assess depression in college students, two inventories were compared: the Student Experience Inventory (SEI) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). SEI, a self-report questionnaire, contains 56 items that are designed to measure hopelessness and decreased energy levels, as well as five factors covered in BDI: (1) negative affect toward self,…

The use of computers to build diagnostic inferences is presented in two contexts: (1) closed world, exemplified by the space shuttle launch monitoring system; and (2) open world, represented by computerized diagnostic testing of reading comprehension. The analysis shows that the closed world provides a substantially cleaner environment within…

The literature on the partial determinants of performance in organizational contexts, particularly the research on situational determinants, suggests several different variables which may be of importance to appraisal processes as well. This point may be exemplified with regard to the situational factors of task ease/difficulty and situational…

It has been hypothesized that college students develop differently in various areas of experience, that they learn to deal with interpersonal relationships early in their college experience, but that they may not have time to develop leisure interests. Instruments designed to assess growth on three of Chickering's student development vectors…

The quality of mathematics multiple choice items and their susceptibility to test wiseness were examined. Test wiseness was defined as "a subject's capacity to utilize the characteristics and formats of the test and/or test taking situation to receive a high score." The study used results of the Graduate Record Examinations Aptitude Test (GRE) and…

This document contains three papers from the Methodology Project of the Center for the Study of Evaluation. Methods for characterizing test accuracy are reported in the first two papers. "Bounds on the K Out of N Reliability of a Test, and an Exact Test for Hierarchically Related Items" describes and illustrates how an extension of a…

Two psychometric approaches for the investigation of item bias were employed to examine the performance of four sociocultural groups on six subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - Revised (WISC-R). The sample of 950 students was from Pima County, Arizona. One approach involved the comparison of the psychometric indices of…

The psychometric properties associated with the "specific objectivity" of the simple logistic model are acknowledged to be far superior to those of competing models. It is therefore the ideal model to be used for test development or for the analysis of any measuring instrument developed within a well-defined psychological construct. In…