The English Phonemic Unit Test measures the ability to produce difficult English sounds which must be mastered to speak English well. The test has been used with students from kindergarten to college. The instument was consensually validated by bilingual specialists, after analyzing the test according to contrastive analysis procedures applied to…

The increased attention to measuring career skills has resulted in more instrument development, more testing of students, and more test administrators. There are three key areas of concern. The first area is that of identifying purposes to be served by assessing career skills. Purposes include permitting descriptions of the current status of…

Generalizability theory is described and applied to data collection methods for student ratings of instruction. Three generalizability coefficients (generalizing over both students and items, generalizing over students only, and generalizing over items only) are defined, and the appropriateness of each for various purposes is discussed.…

Three kinds of rating statements, trait-oriented, worker-oriented, and task-oriented were evaluated in a context permitting the comparisons to be made in terms of criteria external to the ratings. One hundred twenty Air Force noncommissioned officers assigned to seminar grouPs of 13 or 14 were involved. No evidence of superiority was found for any…

This report provides a complete guide to the stand alone mode operation of the reliability and maintenance (R&M) model, which was developed to facilitate the performance of design versus cost trade-offs within the digital avionics information system (DAIS) acquisition process. The features and structure of the model, its input data…

A Self Concept Target Game (SCTG) which was designed to measure the level of aspiration of second or third grade children who had been exposed to at least two years of the Responsive Model Follow Through (RMFT) Program, and the field testing of the game are described in this report. The game is played by throwing and pushing a bean bag along a…

The contribution of heredity to scores on a digit span intelligence test, Jensen's Memory for Numbers, was estimated with a standard heritability formula. The test measures level I mental ability--the capacity to store and recall, but not ability to elaborate or manipulate stimuli. Subjects were 35 monozygotic (MZ) twins and 35 same-sex dizygotic…

A framework is presented that relates concepts of audit reliability to the uses of information gathered from a discrepancy program audit of Elementary and Secondary Education Act Title IV-C programs in Florida. Three issues are addressed: (1) the meaning of reliability in relation to the audit process; (2) the importance of reliability of auditor…

A general process for testing the feasibility of applying alternative mathematical or statistical models to the solution of a practical problem is presented and flowcharted. The system is used to compare five models for test equating: (1) anchor test equating using classical test theory; (2) anchor test equating using the one-parameter logistic…

A rating scale was developed that could be used to test Raynor's construct of perceived instrumentality--that the perceived importance of a particular achievement (such as a good grade) to the student's future (career) influences the student's efforts to achieve the goal. The scale was developed to study the perceived importance of learning French…

First grade children from two Head Start (HS) groups and one non-Head Start (NHS) group were administered a battery of tests for the purposes of (1) comparing the developmental status of HS and NHS subjects, (2) examing patterns of specific learning disabilities among HS and NHS children, (3) determining the stability coefficients of selected…

The problem was to construct, validate, and test a Q-sort instrument consisting of 56 statements measuring attitude changes of individual participants toward the seven educational conditions of the Indiana Plan for Adult Education in the Church. The Q-sort was structured to represent conditions of the plan at two levels with four replications…

The Social Interaction and Creativity in Communication System (SICCS) was constructed for purposes of (1) initiating more objective inquiry into talent identification programs; (2) fostering the observational skill and insight of practitioners wanting to facilitate the communication of creativity in others; (3) assessing the processes and…

The implications of a mathematical model of test scores are explored where the data are limited to a random sample of items without replacement from an indefinitely large population or item domain in which items are scored either zero or one. The purpose is to obtain an unbiased estimate of a student's proportion of items correct in the item…

Latent trait models may offer considerable potential for the improvement of educational measurement practices, but until recently, they have received only limited attention from measurement specialists. This paper provides a brief introduction to latent trait models, and provides test practitioners with a non-technical introduction to the…