The purpose of this study is to establish internal consistency and validity on a survey instrument that has resulted from previous research which examined the perceptions of six teachers as they engaged in the implementation of a nongraded, multiage continuous progress primary program. The need for documentation of student progress was identified…

This document contains four papers from a symposium on assessing the learning organization. "Measuring Organizational Learning: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis of an Organization Survey" (Jamie Callahan Fabian, Ralph O. Mueller, Dail L. Fields) compares two models for measuring four constructs inherent to Schwandt's model of…

Three descriptive statistics (difficulty, discrimination, and reliability) of multiple-choice (MC) test items were compared to those of a new (1980s) format of machine-scored questions. The new method, answer-bank multi-digit testing (MDT), uses alphabetized lists of up to 1,000 alternatives and approximates the completion style of assessment…

This paper reports on a study of the foundation and application of two procedures used to specify appropriate weights to be applied to components in determining the overall quality of a school. These procedures are multiattribute utility technology (MAUT) and policy capturing, and the paper presents the results of applying them, using key…

This report describes a methodology for increasing the validity and reliability of inferences made about the problem-solving ability of science students that is based on performance on different kinds of tests. The generalizable cognitive components of problem solving that might be targeted by assessment are described, and specifications are…

The number of performance-based assessments is increasing rapidly, but to date there is no established procedure for setting standards on these assessments. This paper describes several extensions to the Angoff procedure to accommodate the characteristics of a performance-based assessment and presents the results of research in applying this…

Instructions for the administration of the Opinions about Deaf People Scale are given. This scale measures the beliefs of hearing adults about the capabilities of deaf adults. The somewhat ambiguous title of the instrument is designed to avoid leading respondents to respond in socially desirable ways. The instrument is based on misconceptions…

The Student Descriptor Scale (SDS) was developed as a validation measure to determine whether students described and counted by states as "severely handicapped" were, indeed, students with severe disabilities. The SDS addresses nine characteristics: intellectual disability, health impairment, need for toileting assistance, upper torso motor…

This paper reports the results of using a three-layer backpropagation artificial neural network to predict item difficulty in a reading comprehension test. Two network structures were developed, one with and one without a sigmoid function in the output processing unit. The data set, which consisted of a table of coded test items and corresponding…

The present study examines the influence of judges' item-related knowledge on setting standards for competency tests. Seventeen judges from different professions took a 122-item teacher-certification test in economics while setting competency standards for the test using the Angoff procedure. Judges tended to set higher standards for items they…

As part of a study of teacher evaluation of student replies to open-ended questions, a second question--the best method of determining interrater reliability--was examined. The standard method, the Pearson Product-Moment correlation, overestimated the degree of match between researchers' and teachers' scoring of tests. The simpler percent…

The relationships of science anxiety to measures of achievement, test anxiety, year of chemistry taken, and gender were investigated for high school students; the study also attemped to establish reliability data on the Czerniak Assessment of Science Anxiety (CASA) of L. Chiarelott and C. Czerniak (1987). Subjects were 101 students (45 males and…

Stability of the Early Screening Profiles (ESP), developed by P. Harrison, was examined with a sample of 23 non-handicapped preschool children (14 females and 9 males) ranging in age from 3 years 0 months to 6 years 0 months at the time of initial testing. The sample was drawn from a rural/suburban community in the midwest with a predominantly…

Observational ratings of student clinical performance are influenced by factors other than the quality of the performance. Individual raters may be more stringent or lenient than their colleagues. In this medical school setting, multiple raters evaluated each student. To reduce the influence of "error" due to differences among raters, each rater…

A tool was devised to measure the perceived reality of television, an important variable in understanding how television influences an individual's perception of social reality. This was accomplished by using a research plan that allowed university subjects to generate the measures used for tapping the "reality" of television content.…