The International Standards Organization (ISO) has developed standards to provide a uniform framework for quality assurance in organizations' products and services. Commonly referred to as ISO 9000, these standards focus on achieving and sustaining the quality of the product or service produced to continuously meet purchasers' needs, and give…

This study explores an endeavor by the Ohio Consortium for Portfolio Development to assess preservice teachers' reflectivity as demonstrated through the development of professional portfolios. The first section of this paper presents the demographic information of the study, explaining the consortium derivation, purpose, and interrater format. The…

Designing a test using three-parameter item response theory (IRT) is discussed. A brief review of IRT is followed by a discussion of two types of test design: (1) selecting items using confidence envelopes (confidence envelope method); and (2) using item characteristic curves and their confidence intervals (test envelope method). The confidence…

It has been postulated that young people are open to driving accidents because of age, lack of experience and risk-taking attitudes. The Young Driver Attitude Scale (YDAS) was developed to measure attitudes likely to influence driving practices. Over 200 items relating to the risk-taking attitudes of young people were shown to a small group of…

To study the stability of students' writing performances across occasions, four essays were obtained from each of 107 college students. These were scored with an analytic system that counts errors in 18 categories. Score reliability, computed by summing the 18 categories, was .36 for a single essay and .68 for the set of four essays. Score…

Inspection of the 1972 revised norms for the Stanford-Binet demonstrate that the average mental age for a particular chronological age (CA) no longer numerically corresponds to that CA. Thus, mental ages derived from the test cannot any longer be interpreted as mental ages. A table of test ages based on the 1972 norms is provided. (Author)

This is the preliminary report of a new memory scoring method. Using the Wechsler Memory Scale as its base, it scores lateralized verbal and figural memory and long- and short-term memory. Six independent memory scales were developed. Studies of 105 subjects demonstrate that these scales are reliable and valid. (Author)

Concludes that the "Inventory of Teacher Knowledge of Reading" is valid in discriminating between the specialist and non-specialist in reading, but that it fails to verify the seven components that the authors claim to measure. (RB)

A multidimensional aggression scoring system for preschool children's responses to the structured doll play interview is described. The system, which incorporates previous investigator's findings, scales doll play responses along three dimensions of aggression: intensity, agent, and directionality. (Author)

Some basic statistical concepts relevant to the teacher--mean scores, standard deviation, normal and skewed distributions, z scores, item analysis, standard error of measurement, reliability--and their use by the teacher are explained. (RM)

Describes (1) the development and reliability and validity evaluation of the Person Preference Test; and (2) the utilization of the instrument to determine whether clothing style, hair style, global appearance, and part-whole perception influence children's preference for persons represented by stimulus figures. (SDH)

The simulated oral proficiency interview (SOPI) is a semi-direct speaking test that models the format of the oral proficiency interview (OPI). The OPI is a method of assessing general speaking proficiency in a second language. The SOPI is a tape-recorded test consisting of six parts: simple personal background questions posed in a simulated…