A teacher of gifted and talented students recounts her own personal experience of "failing" a creativity test and the realization that tests have limitations and only measure an individual's performance on a given day based on particular standards and criteria. (DB)

Discusses how online programs are using new strategies of testing, both to teach students and to prove that distance education works; however, some educators question their efficacy. (EV)

Discusses various aspects of standardization and testing in science education and their effects on students and on reform efforts. Argues that science educators need to begin to question the system and their practices with regard to testing and need to be willing to act on the answers they find. Contains 10 references. (JRH)

Examines testing practices in: (1) the past, in which the traditional paradigm left little room for cognitive psychology principles; (2) the present, in which testing research is enhanced by principles of cognitive psychology; and (3) the future, in which the potential of cognitive psychology should be fully realized through item design.…

Describes the Dutch rating system for test quality, which evaluates a test for seven criteria, and analyses the results of test ratings from the past 18 years. Results show a steady increase in test quality in the Netherlands that can be attributed to use of better tests and declining use of tests of less quality after evaluation. (SLD)

Describes the 1997 revision of the Dutch Rating System for Test Quality used by a committee of the Dutch Association of Psychologists. The rating system evaluates test quality on seven criteria using a checklist for each criterion. Comment sections provide additional information, and weighting rules establish the final grades. (SLD)

This article focuses on Louis Guttman's contributions to the classical theory of educational and psychological tests, one of the lesser known of his many contributions to quantitative methods in the social sciences. Guttman's work in this field provided a rigorous mathematical basis for ideas that, for many decades after Spearman's initial work,…

This study examined the validity of one state's alternate assessment portfolio system using the American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education's Standards for Psychological and Educational Testing. The results indicate serious shortcomings in the evidence for content,…

In this article, the author explains the key differences among three kinds of instructionally relevant tests that can have a huge impact on what goes on in classrooms: "instructionally insensitive tests," "instructionally sensitive tests," and "instructionally informative tests." If educators understand the advantages and limitations of these…

Item families, which are groups of related items, are becoming increasingly popular in complex educational assessments. For example, in automatic item generation (AIG) systems, a test may consist of multiple items generated from each of a number of item models. Item calibration or scoring for such an assessment requires fitting models that can…

The guiding principles and procedures for pupil assessment in Portuguese compulsory education were established by the Implementing Order No. 1/2005, 5th January, with amendments introduced by the Implementing Orders No. 18/2006, 14th March and No. 5/2007, 10th January, and apply to the learning objectives and competencies defined for the various…

In the past 150 years, educational systems have expanded and become integrally linked with economic, political, and social status in modern nation-states. As the stakes for education have risen, so has the call for more and improved use of scientific evidence as a basis for educational policymaking. Evidence from averaged scores on international…

This chapter attempts to survey contemporary debates and research on outcomes of schooling that have been grouped together under the convenient label "nonacademic". This is not an affirmative labeling. As the nomenclature indicates, it is not a label that groups together things that share like properties. Rather, this is a label of…

Conventional testing systems usually give students a score as their test result, but do not show them how to improve their learning performance. Researchers have indicated that students would benefit more if individual learning guidance could be provided. However, most of the existing learning diagnosis models ignore the fact that one concept…

Many educational testing programs report examinee performance at more than two levels of proficiency. Whether these assessments have the capacity to support these multiple inferences, though, is a topic that has not been widely discussed. This study proposes a method for evaluating the minimum number of measurement opportunities for reporting…