The New Jersey College Basic Skills Placement Test (NJCBSPT) is designed to measure certain basic language and mathematics skills of students entering New Jersey colleges. The primary purpose of the two mathematics sections is to determine whether students are prepared to begin certain college-level work without a handicap in computation or…

Baumrind (1971) proposed three distinct patterns of parental authority (permissiveness, authoritarianism, and authoritativeness) and measured these parenting styles through interviews with parents and their children and through observations of parents interacting with their children. This study was undertaken to develop a readily-accessible,…

This paper provides principles which can be used to mark mathematics papers in secondary schools. Sections included are: (1) "Drafting the Marking Scheme" (describing 15 general considerations); (2) "Calculations" (listing 16 grading principles on computation papers); (3) "Graphs" (providing four guidelines on graph papers); (4) "Constructions"…

A total of 2,000 essays written by 1,000 students was submitted to generalizability analyses for domain-referenced tests. Each student had written one essay on each of two prompts representing two models of discourse. Each essay was read by six readers and judged on a scale of from 1 to 4. No reader read essays from both prompts. Reader agreement…

Since 1977, South Carolina law has required every school to develop annual and long-range (3-year) plans based on a needs assessment. Based on a 1984 law, the State Board of Education adopted the following effective schools indicators as bases of assessments: (1) instructional leadership of the principal; (2) emphasis on academics, including basic…

This initial study phase deals with the accuracy of the information provided by students on the newly revised Student Descriptive Questionnaire (SDQ). The SDQ, an optional part of the College Board's Admissions Testing Program, is intended to supplement the information base to improve the quality of decisions made by college admissions personnel,…

An item format incorporating pattern recognition was designed to assess medical students' abilities in the area of clinical diagnosis. A group of approximately 20 faculty members of five New England medical schools met in Worcester for half of a day to develop pattern recognition items. Teams of four to six physicians were assigned to work on…

Attitude measurement through Likert-type surveys usually provides no opportunity to assess the importance of the statements of the subjects. This study, involving 479 graduate and undergraduate students, examines the question of whether importance and agreement measures have different underlying dimensions, and examines the question of whether the…

This document is a training module designed to familiarize practicing school psychologists and school psychology students with the field of criterion-referenced measurement and recent developments within the field. The introduction gives reasons for the need for criterion-referenced testing as opposed to norm-referenced tests which include legal…

The primary purpose of this study was to devise a valid and reliable scale to assess the teaching concerns of early childhood students at various levels in their teacher training experiences. A total of 167 concerns, generated by 104 teacher trainees, their trainers, and an extensive review of the literature, were classified according to Katz's…

Because item order and salience may affect the findings of social science research, a study was conducted to determine the effect of topic salience on subject response to different item orders. In the study, 10 high salience self-esteem items were presented with 10 low salience items concerning product labels in three versions. In the first…

This teacher's edition of training materials on bilingual program planning, implementation, and evaluation focuses on testing instruments. The guide is part of a series directed at bilingual educators and intended for use in institutions of higher education and inservice teacher education programs. Training objectives, a pretest and posttest, and…

This report describes the development and norming of parallel forms of the Air Force Reading Abilities Test (AFRAT) which have been designed for Air Force use as replacements for commercial reading tests. A previous study on service applicants found considerably divergent reading grade levels (RGL's) from different commercial tests for subjects of…

This study follows a 1980 moratorium on group mental ability testing called by the district's superintendent when questions relating to the informational value and cost-effectiveness of the Otis Lennon Mental Ability Test (OLMA) were raised by the Oklahoma City Public School District. Criticisms of intelligence tests and relevant issues are…

A student-generated, self-anchoring instrument should provide a teacher with more and different information than do conventional techniques. Such an instrument was developed by students in four sections of a basic course in speech communication. Students were asked to generate statements that described teacher behaviors adapted to their needs and…