Curricula for public library use instruction designed for limited-English-proficient (LEP) students are presented. Lessons are included for each of four instructional levels, and each lesson assumes that the student may have exposure to only one lesson. These basic concepts are covered: (1) information on all subjects is available at the public…

The instrument for Colorado's Foreign Language Proficiency Sample Project and directions for its administration are provided in this document. The project is a voluntary, teacher-designed and -administered effort to standardize high school student language proficiency assessment techniques. The materials are used in teacher workshops. The…

Item components that might contribute to the difficulty of items on the Raven Colored Progressive Matrices (CPM) and the Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) were studied. Subjects providing responses to CPM items were 269 children aged 2 years 9 months to 11 years 8 months, most of whom were referred for testing as potentially gifted. A second…

This paper reports on the process of modifying the ModelCreator item generation system to produce output in multiple languages. In particular, Japanese and Spanish are now supported in addition to English. The addition of multilingual functionality was considerably facilitated by the general formulation of our natural language generation system,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of using multidimensional items in a computer adaptive test (CAT) setting which assumes a unidimensional item response theory (IRT) framework. Previous research has suggested that the composite of multidimensional abilities being estimated by a unidimensional IRT model is not constant…

A listing of computer software for use in high school and adult English-as-a-second-language instruction includes over 40 items, categorized for grammar, reading/writing, or vocabulary teaching, with descriptions of each. The listings include such information as the title, focus, proficiency level, components, content, comments, and brief…

Responses to American College Test College Outcome Measures Program (ACT-COMP) items by 481 black and 9,237 white students at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville) were analyzed using F. Samejima's graded model to determine the level of differential item functioning (DIF). Students had been tested using Form 8 of the ACT-COMP objective test…

The construction of objective tests for native language reading comprehension is described. The tests were designed for the early secondary school years in several kinds of schools, vocational and non-vocational. The description focuses on the use of the Rasch model in test development, to develop a large pool of homogenous items and establish…

While the populations of students learning writing in English as a second language (ESL) are diverse and have widely varying needs, three general recommendations to nonspecialist teachers of ESL pupils are to: (1) organize courses according to thematic unity; (2) limit the number of formal, polished essays assigned; and (3) encourage students to…

Criteria for the evaluation of foreign language materials in the commonly and less commonly taught languages in secondary and postsecondary institutions are presented. They are intended for use by individual teachers or appointed committees when selecting and evaluating language teaching materials. The criteria contain a set of evaluative and…

The Survey of Special Test Administrations was administered to people with disabilities concerning their responses to special testing accommodations, both for college testing and for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and Graduate Record Examinations (GRE). The questionnaires were developed to evaluate testing accommodations for disabled people…

This study compared student performance on language-usage test items presented in two different formats: as discrete sentences and as items embedded in passages. American College Testing (ACT) Program's Assessment experimental units were constructed that presented 40 items in the two different formats. Results suggest item presentation may not…

The problem of measuring growth across the target grade and, typically, the two adjacent grades, concerns most developers of standardized, norm-referenced achievement tests, particularly at the item selection stage. Opinion is divided on whether to retain or drop items that do not get easier from grade to grade. The controversy has focused on…

A study of the effects of the complexity of scenarios used in the Strategic Interaction Method of second language instruction had four scenarios of varying complexity performed by four university classes of students of English as a second language at varying levels. Indicators of complexity included the degree of verbalness, contextual constraint,…

This in-depth study explores problem areas of Hong Kong secondary and university students in writing narrative and argumentative compositions on two different themes. Subjects were 40 university English majors, 40 form four and 40 form six secondary students. The research indicates that the students at these grade levels experienced difficulty in…