The differential item functioning of mathematics performance of Hispanic, Asian, and White students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was studied, using a modification of the Mantel-Haenszel Procedure. The sample for grades 3, 7, and 11, respectively, included: (1) 1,367, 1,570, and 1,580 Whites; (2) 265, 613, and 760…

A method for understanding and controlling the multiple facets of an oral examination (OE) or other judge-intermediated examination is presented and illustrated. This study focused on determining the extent to which the facets model (FM) analysis constructs meaningful variables for each facet of an OE involving protocols, examiners, and…

A study investigated how students' mental representation of an expository text and the inferences they used in summarizing varied as a function of text difficulty and of differences in the task. Subjects, 96 college students and students from grades 6 and 10, wrote summaries of expository texts and answered orally several probe questions about the…

This report describes courseware for comprehensive computer-assisted testing and instruction. With this program, a personal computer can be used to: (1) generate multiple test versions to meet test objectives; (2) create study guides for self-directed learning; and (3) evaluate student and teacher performance. Numerous multiple-choice examples,…

The annotated bibliography provides information on commercially prepared materials that can be used in classrooms at all levels where English is taught as a second language. Twenty-four textbook series are described, arranged alphabetically by title. The listing is preceded by a categorization of the series by their content and focus:…

The materials status report for Tigrinya, which is spoken in Ethiopia, is one of a series intended to provide the nonspecialist with a picture of the availability and quality of texts for teaching a given language to English speakers. Each report consists of: (1) a brief narrative description of the language, the areas where it is spoken, its…

The materials status report for Zulu is one of a series intended to provide the nonspecialist with a picture of the availability and quality of texts for teaching a given language to English speakers. The report consists of: (1) a brief narrative description of the language, the areas where it is spoken, its major dialects, its writing system,…

The materials status report for Xhosa is one of a series intended to provide the nonspecialist with a picture of the availability and quality of texts for teaching a given language to English speakers. The report consists of: (1) a brief narrative description of the language, the areas where it is spoken, its major dialects, its writing system,…

The decline in Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores is a direct result of lower average performance on equating questions that are reused over a period of several years. Therefore, it is important to examine the content of representative questions, used over time, for possible obsolescence. Two panels, one concentrating on the verbal section of…

An opinionnaire was administered to 122 students in the teacher education program at Western Kentucky University as part of a longitudinal study to determine student attitudes toward their professors, courses, and themselves. Eight biases were tested: (1) Education courses tend to be easier than most other college courses; (2) Education courses…

A study was undertaken to determine if there was a difference in verbal responses in classrooms of teachers who scored high and who scored low on the complexity scale of the Omnibus Personality Inventory (OPI), which measures teacher tolerance of ambiguity and preference for complexity. Forty college English teachers were tested and ranked…

The Basic Occupational Literacy Test (BOLT) was developed as an achievement test of basic skills in reading and arithmetic, for educationally disadvantaged adults. The objective was to develop a test appropriate for this population with regard to content, format, instructions, timing, norms, and difficulty level. A major issue, the use of grade…

In order to compose equivalent certification tests in the basic skills in reading, mathematics calculations and applications, and writing for high school graduation requirements, the San Jose Unified School District, California, used the Rasch computer program to arrive at the scaled difficulty level of test items. The procedure for achieving a…

The validity of cut-off scores, used to place students into English and mathematics courses, and a dichotomized success variable, representing student abilities related to success in three sequential mathematics courses, were investigated. This study, examining the cutting scores of students entering Mercer County Community College in Fall, 1978,…

Matrix tasks designed to assess the logical properties of multiple classification and multiple seriation were administered to 105 first, third, and fifth grade children. The tasks included cross-class and double series matrices, each of which had a reproduction and a transposition instructional set, and a revised set of cross-class and double…