Conventional mastery tests designed to make optimal mastery classifications were compared with fixed-length and variable-length adaptive mastery tests. Comparisons between the testing procedures were made across five content areas in an introductory biology course from tests administered to volunteers. The criterion was the student's standing in…

The Pennsylvania Preschool Inventory (PPI) was developed as a straight-forward and efficient measure of the relative cognitive development of the young child, offering an alternative to more complicated, elaborate assessment instruments. Results of the inventory are potentially relevant to both current and future school success of children between…

The fear of success (FOS) construct in the achievement motivation of women was initially written by undergraduates in which the opening sentence described a male or female who ranked first in a medical school class. From these results, an intrapsychic interpretation of FOS was made. Other researchers, who accepted the sex of the cue character as…

Reports by students and teachers of their experiences of personal victimization are used to examine the meaning and distribution of rates or victimization in a national sample of 642 public junior and senior high schools. This research integrates data from questionnaire responses by the schools' principals, teachers, and students; student…

A study explored the relation between Piagetian conservation tasks, IQ scores, and reading test scores. A series of 16 items involving conservation tasks for area, length, weight, and volume were presented to 516 students in grades four through nine. The scores on these conservation items were correlated with students' scores on achievement and IQ…

This study was the first phase of a three-phase study to develop, adopt, and implement competency based curriculum for Illinois agricultural occupations programs at the secondary level. As a procedural field test, phase I developed an occupational matrix for one of the U.S. Office of Education agricultural occupation program areas (horticulture)…

This revised manual for the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) discusses: (1) historical development; (2) item analysis; (3) factor analysis; (4) physical format; (5) general working population norms (ages 18-54); (6) intercorrelations of raw GATB test scores and of GATB aptitude scores; (7) development of norms for specific occupations (tables…

Pseudoscience, or the process of persuasion by establishing a pretense of scientific discovery, is examined in this book in an effort to dispel false notions about the validity of various measures of intelligence and the correlations of genetics to mental ability. The history and development of concepts related to hereditary intelligence and…

After a brief historical review of the background and research, the paper focuses on development of a teacher-administered behavior rating scale to screen for school adaptation problems on a large scale basis using as Ss 15 primary grade teachers and their ratings of 315 primary grade children (ages 6-to-10 years) in their classes. A 16-item…

Six essays on technical measurement problems in criterion referenced tests and four essays by psychometricians proposing solutions are presented: (1) "Criterion-Referenced Measurement" and Other Such Terms, by Marvin C. Alkin which is an overview of the first six papers; (2) Selecting Objectives and Generating Test Items for Objectives-Based…

This longitudinal study examined the relationship of the physical-neurological conditions of infants at one minute after birth to mental and motor development at prekindergarten and kindergarten levels. Subjects were 44 children, 16 males and 28 females, born in 1970 in the same hospital. Neonatal physical status one minute after birth was…

This executive summary presents the major findings of Interim Report III, which reports preliminary evaluation of Project Developmental Continuity (PDC). A Head Start demonstration program, PDC is aimed at promoting greater educational and developmental continuity as children make the transition from preschool to school. The report addresses three…

Thirty-four research reports and summaries of projects studying law school admission and the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) are presented. These research projects were supported by the Law School Admission Council between 1970 and 1974. A subject index and an author index for volume I, covering 1949-1969, and for this volume are also provided.…

The development and data validation of the 1977 Ladd-Lipset national survey of the American professoriate are described. The respondents were selected from a random sample of colleges and universities and from a random sample of individual faculty members from the universities. The 158 institutions in the 1977 survey were selected from 2,406…

A pool of items used for student ratings of college instructors was studied by means of two factor analyses. Major objectives were to confirm the existence of the major dimensions of student ratings as identified in previous research literature, and to determine whether categories or levels of item specificity could be identified. As to the first…