The use of online rater self-training is growing in popularity and has obvious practical benefits, facilitating access to training materials and rating samples and allowing raters to reorient themselves to the rating scale and self monitor their behaviour at their own convenience. However there has thus far been little research into rater…

The author describes teaching eighth-grade students about the civil rights movement. Teachers used photographs of students in the 1950s as a central theme of their unit about the U.S. civil rights movement. Using these photographs as a learning tool inspired the students to be engaged in history. At the end of the unit, students were able to…

Maja Wilson believes that efforts to standardize language through rubrics and generalized comments provide a disservice to students and undermine the power of the reading and writing experience. She advocates making use of our subjectivity as readers, conceding that her values cannot be standardized and often shift in response to interactions with…

This paper responds to Resolution 9.05 Fall 2007, calling for an update of the Academic Senate's 1996 paper Program Review: Developing a Faculty Driven Process in the light of recent accreditation changes and other emerging issues. This paper has been written to expand on the best elements of the 1996 paper and to stand on its own without…

In the fall of 2005 the principal and teachers at Knickerbacker Middle School (KMS) were worried. KMS was a "School in Good Standing" but had not hit federal or state benchmarks because of low subgroup scores on the English Language Arts (ELA) test--especially scores received by economically disadvantaged students, about half of this…

A multiple choice test item is identified as flawed if it has no single best answer. In spite of extensive quality control procedures, the administration of flawed items to test-takers is inevitable. Common strategies for dealing with flawed items in conventional testing, grounded in the principle of fairness to test-takers, are reexamined in the…

A study was undertaken to determine the effects on essay scores of intermingling handwritten and word-processed versions of student essays. A sample of 32 examinees, each of whom had produced both a handwritten and a word-processed essay, was drawn from a larger group who had participated in a pilot study of item types for The Praxis Series:…

This Digest provides a rationale for developing grading guides to use with business writing students. It describes the methods business communications teachers can use to construct and employ guides to provide students with quality writing instruction. The Digest maintains that teachers can construct either skills analysis grading guides and/or…

Two-stage and multistage test designs provide a way of roughly adapting item difficulty to test-taker ability. All test takers take a parallel stage-one test, and, based on their scores, they are routed to tests of different difficulty levels in subsequent stages. These designs provide some of the benefits of standard computerized adaptive testing…

It is generally assumed that test administrators are accurate and dependable, and that the psychometric properties of validity and reliability applied to test givers are at acceptably high levels. The test giver is thought to have been standardized through training reinforced by experience. This paper considers validity and reliability in relation…

The Work Keys System from the American College Testing Program is an innovative national system that provides a continuous structure for documenting and improving the workplace skills of individuals. By providing individuals with reliable information about their own skill levels and the levels required for jobs, Work Keys can help individuals make…

An ethnographic study investigated conversations during planning meetings and placement rating sessions for selecting and rating freshman composition placement exams. Planning meetings involved the administrative coordinator and two assistants selecting model essays, discussing the rubric, and confirming the final plans for the rating session.…

This report presents results of a fall 1993 survey of 164 adult education agencies in California concerning their placement procedures for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students. The survey had two purposes. First, the information gathered by a questionnaire (appended) was to provide the California department of education with a profile of…

This paper explores common concerns about competency testing as they relate to the certification of high school graduates seeking a diploma in the United States. Competency testing is widespread in the United States, with 40 states engaged in competency testing in at least one grade. In general, and particularly for graduation requirements, the…

Many testing programs include a section of optional questions in addition to mandatory parts of a test. These optional parts of a test are not often truly parallel to one another, and groups of examinees selecting each optional test section are not equivalent to one another. This paper provides a general method based on missing-data methods for…