Asks whether different scoring systems can explain why many studies have found female failures in performing tasks that were designed to assess concepts of horizontality and verticality. Presents new findings involving 86 men and boys and 84 women and girls through which no significant sex differences were found. Discusses suggestions and…

Provides several suggestions to help prepare students for peer assessment: (1) emphasize its purpose; (2) articulate relationship between peer assessment and learning outcomes; (3) ensure students understand elements of high-quality, proficient performance; (4) develop analytic scoring criteria systems; (5) encourage collaborative discussions; and…

This article updates information about the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) by reporting on predictive validity data from the most recent data collection point in Torrance's longitudinal studies. First, we outline the background of the tests and changes in scoring over the years. Then, we detail the results of the analyses of the 40-year…

Peer assessments are recommended for overcoming the difficulties that teachers have with providing individual feedback and assessing student progress in physical education classes. A peer assessment can be used as a learning task (in a progression) or a formative assessment. A peer assessment is a variation of peer teaching, an instructional…

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…

At some point in an educator's professional life, he may be asked to serve on an awards committee for current publications in his field. An educator's concern then is on how to do it without bias, and more importantly, how to do it when the texts may be very different from each other. One text may be theory-based; one may be a textbook; and…

Whereas great advances have been made in the statistical sophistication of assessments in terms of evidence accumulation and task selection, relatively little statistical work has explored the possibility of applying statistical techniques to data for the purposes of determining appropriate domain understanding and to generate task-level scoring…

This article describes one classroom's experience engaging in a lesson that challenged introductory art students to design a functional ceramic clock in an art-historical style of their choice. The clocks were sculpted in low-relief so that the hands of the clockworks could move freely around the face of the clock. Students were given an…

In this study, the precision of subscale score estimates was evaluated when out-of-scale information was incorporated. Procedures that incorporated out-of-scale information and only information within a subscale were compared through a series of simulations. It was revealed that more information (i.e., more precision) was always provided for…

The United States is currently involved in a continuing controversy about how best to measure the education of children. President Bush and his Administration have pushed for a bevy of standardized assessments, the results of which would be used to reward high-scoring schools and punish low-scoring ones. State departments of education and school…

Good performance criteria can and must help define educational goals and serve as an instructional tool in the classroom. The rationale for considering instructional usefulness when designing performance criteria begins with the proposition that clearly stated performance criteria are excellent instructional tools. It is also apparent that…

Work on the development of history performance assessments is described. So far, six complete sets of assessments in United States history have been developed as part of this project. Students are first assessed on their historical knowledge of the period through a short-answer test. They are then asked to write an essay explaining the positions…

This study describes intergroup guessing differences in response to tests and to test-like tasks. It is a composite of seven component inquiries with three substudies in Phase 1 and four in Phase 2. These seven studies cover the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) item-type domain from a number of viewpoints relevant to implicit guessing behavior.…

Four systems for scoring student essays were used to classify eleventh grade and undergraduate students according to writing ability. The reliabilities of the raters and the validities of the systems in classifying students were emphasized. Two analytic scoring systems--which assume that quality writing is characterized by the inclusion of certain…

Outlines the benefits and limitations of automated assessment and offers practical advice for individuals and departments considering a move in that direction. Maintains that using optical mark readers (OMRs) in conjunction with objective tests can result in significant time savings. Briefly discusses using OMRs for student evaluations. (MJP)