A process for judging the alignment between curriculum standards and assessments developed by the author is presented. This process produces information on the relationship of standards and assessments on four alignment criteria: Categorical Concurrence, Depth of Knowledge Consistency, Range of Knowledge Correspondence, and Balance of…

This report shows a classification of differential item functioning (DIF) sources that have an effect on the adaptation of tests. This classification is based on linguistic and cultural criteria. Four general DIF sources are distinguished: cultural relevance, translation problems, morph syntactical differences, and semantic differences. The…

Randomly equivalent forms (REF) of tests in listening and reading for nonnative speakers of English were created by stratified random assignment of items to forms, stratifying on item content and predicted difficulty. The study included 50 replications of the procedure for each test. Each replication generated 2 REFs. The equivalence of those 2…

Construct validity concerns for the IPT I Oral Grades K-6 Spanish Second Edition (IPT-S) as a measure of native oral language proficiency are examined. The examination included describing a subset of items that contributes most to overall score and native-language proficiency designation. Correlations between this subset of items and the overall…

The Parent Education Profile (PEP) is an instrument used by family literacy programs to rate parents' support for children's literacy development. This article uses Critical Discourse Analysis to examine how the PEP constructs the ideal parent, the text's underlying assumptions about parenting and education, and its ideological effects. The…

The authors developed and validated a measure of teachers' motivation toward specific work tasks: The Work Tasks Motivation Scale for Teachers (WTMST). The WTMST is designed to assess five motivational constructs toward six work tasks (e.g., class preparation, teaching). The authors conducted a preliminary (n = 42) and a main study among…

In this technical report, we describe the development and piloting of a series of mathematics progress monitoring measures intended for use with students in grade 1. These measures, available as part of easyCBM [TM], an online progress monitoring assessment system, were developed in 2008 and administered to approximately 2800 students from schools…

This is a book about quality and how to control quality through deliberate actions on the part of the professionals developing and implementing the instances of instruction available at an organization. Quality control theory favors no particular learning philosophy and is only directed towards aspects of how, what, where and when measurements are…

A scaling procedure has been developed for ordering binary parallelogram preference data. The procedure uses minimum variance of the item ranks averaged across persons as the optimization criterion. Two seriation strategies are employed. One is pairwise interchange. The second joins together the vector end points and breaks this circle between…

An analysis of variance approach to estimating reliability is examined. This approach uses an internal-consistency index for estimating the reliability of survey instruments containing ranked items, and is recommended when the relative ranking of item means is of interest to survey researchers. The computation of this index is demonstrated using…

Various item selection techniques are compared on criterion-referenced reliability and validity. Techniques compared include three nominal criterion-referenced methods, a traditional point biserial selection, teacher selection, and random selection. (Author)

A scale was developed to measure attitude toward school among elementary school pupils. Scores on the questionnaire were positively correlated with teacher ratings of school attitudes, non-verbal ability, standardized tests of school achievement and self-concept scores for a sample of fourth grade pupils. (Author)

Discusses study involving parcels of homegenous items as opposed to item factoring. (SDH)

Bounds are established for log cross-product ratios (log odds ratios) involving pairs of items for item response models. First, expressions for bounds on log cross-product ratios are provided for unidimensional item response models in general. Then, explicit bounds are obtained for the Rasch model and the two-parameter logistic (2PL) model.…

A model of test item dependency is presented and used to illustrate the effect that violations of local independence have on the behavior of item characteristic curves. The dependency model is flexible enough to simulate the interaction of a number of factors including item difficulty and item discrimination, varying degrees of item dependence,…