During the 1986 administration of the Work Aspect Preference Scale (WAPS) in a study of career development from Year 8 to Year 9, some of the students in Mount Druitt, west of Sydney, Australia, had difficulty in understanding the meaning of some terms. A closer investigation was then conducted of the usefulness of the WAPS for this group of…

Reasons for administering tests fall into two categories--decision-making and promoting learning. The two bases of tests are learning objectives and the level of learning at which training is developed. Test development involves a number of steps. The best way to tie objectives to test items is through the use of a table of specifications, which…

Four papers presented at the National Council on Measurement in Education meeting are critiqued. G. R. Mandeville and H. Heidari (1988), in a study of unusually effective schools, asked if correlations among cohorts of schools differ depending on the method of analysis used. It is suggested that it would be better to ask whether schools identified…

A program evaluation was conducted of a summer program for academically gifted students in 5th through 10th grades. The purpose of this study was to evaluate discrepancies and congruencies among program teachers, counselors, and students in perceptions of program goal emphasis. The evaluation instrument used was a rating form composed of 60 goal…

The evaluation tools written by teachers are rarely valid or reliable. One teaching aid that can help in the creation of an effective evaluation instrument is called a test map. A test map is a systematic method to consider variables that are important in the construction of the format of a test. Five variables that are discussed in the test…

Inspired by four recent decisions to change achievement tests used in the Austin Independent School District, the separate forms used and procedures followed have been combined into a systematic approach intended for use in future achievement test selections. A rating scale (Attachment 1) was developed to expedite a systematic comparison among…

The Assessment Resource Center (ARC) at Florida State University provides computer assisted testing (CAT) for approximately 4,000 students each term. Computer capabilities permit a small proctoring staff to administer tests simultaneously to large numbers of students. Programs provide immediate feedback for students and generate a variety of…

The faculty of an intensive program of English as a second language for college-bound students, questioning the objectivity of faculty evaluations of non-native college applicants' written essays, assessed the existing evaluation process, reformed it, tested it, and planned for ongoing development. In the first stage, readers read and graded…

Several analyses were performed as part of the process of validating a recently developed scale to measure the attitudes of students toward writing. The Florida Writing Project Student Survey is a 25-item measure of writing attitudes designed for use with students in grades six through twelve. It was developed to assess the attitudes of students…

The objectives for this study were to: (1) develop a valid, reliable measure of test-wiseness with equivalent forms for use with students in the health sciences; and (2) determine the level of test-wiseness of entering medical students. The test-wiseness areas included in this study were: similar options, umbrella term, item give-away, convergence…

This presentation examines the history of merit pay and analyzes studies and research on merit pay to discover directions for developing effective procedures. Reasons for failure of merit pay plans include administrative problems, personnel problems, collective bargaining, financial problems, unsatisfactory evaluation, staff dissension,…

As data on the reliability and validity of ratings of infant temperament have accumulated, researchers have begun to ask what caregiver ratings really measure. An argument has been made that ratings of social behavior are less a reflection of enduring individual differences than a measure of rater characteristics and error variance. This study…

The Hiskey-Nebraska Test of Learning Aptitude (H-NTLA) (Hiskey, 1966) has been regarded by reviewers as one of the best instruments for assessing the learning abilities of hearing-impaired children. However, there has been a paucity of research on the validity of this test. Further, there is no established test-retest reliability, and questions…

Despite the popularity of both multiple-choice (MC) and true-false (TF) items, most investigations comparing the two formats have done so to determine the optimum number of choices to be given to students within a given time period. The purpose of this investigation was to compare the reliabilities and the validities of both formats when the items…

The purposes of this study were to examine the reliability and validity of a basal reading series mastery test, and to explore the appropriateness and usefulness of two strategies for investigating the reliability and validity of criterion-referenced tests. Subjects were 47 sixth graders, who were tested on the SRA Reading Achievement Test, the…