Alverno College (Wisconsin) defines a curriculum in which all students demonstrate certain major abilities within their disciplines or professional areas, and it assesses those abilities as its primary graduation requirements. The college-wide assessment center has enabled assessment of complex abilities not easily tested through a single course.…

This study hypothesized that items in the one-question-per-passage format would be less easily answered when administered without their associated contexts than conventional reading comprehension items. A total of 256 seventh and eighth grade students were administered both Forms 3A and 3B of the Sequential Tests of Educational Progress (STEP 11).…

This study investigates the extent to which the higher order factors of symbolic and semantic content are differentiated. The main concern is an expository description of the use of confirmatory factor analysis in establishing factorial validity. Reanalyzed data originally collected in 1968 involved a sample of 197 tenth, eleventh and twelfth…

This paper examined test scores and information about test takers collected from the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) national test administration files, GRE validity study data provided by institutional users, and survey questionnaires sent to test repeaters. Data were collected from 200,000 men and women who took the GRE General Test in June…

This guide is designed to serve as a reference to assist providers of Job Training Partnership Act-funded programs in selecting appropriate interest, aptitude, and pre-employment and job readiness tests. Descriptions of 53 interest tests, 38 aptitude tests, and 37 pre-employment and job readiness tests are provided. Each description contains…

This manual is intended to provide students, teachers, counselors, and other school personnel with a set of practical instruments and procedures designed to measure the generalizable mathematics skills of students in secondary vocational programs. Three types of assessment instruments and procedures are presented and discussed: (1) student…

Since the fall of 1984, the Pennsylvania Department of Education has conducted a yearly statewide testing of the reading and mathematics competencies of students in grades 3, 5, and 8. Because Pennsylvania does not mandate statewide curricula, the Department has had to rely upon committees of state educators to determine which objectives to test.…

To assist administrators, teachers, and other school personnel in understanding and implementing the various components of the Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress (ISTEP) program, this manual details the ISTEP program, a broad-based achievement testing plan providing Indiana schools with a means of assessing their overall…

The Nevada Department of Education implemented a standard setting study of the Pre-Professional Skills Tests. The tests constitute a secure test battery developed by the Educational Testing Service to assess basic proficiency in reading, writing, and mathematics via three multiple-choice tests and a written essay test. The Nevada study, in the…

The testing of many American Indian children using standardized exams (achievement, aptitude, ability, and intelligence tests) developed for the majority American society represents a case of cross-cultural testing which is likely to produce invalid results in the form of underestimation of student performance. Requirements for obtaining accurate…

A project was conducted to develop a model for evaluating placement testing in the North Carolina System of Community Colleges. Researchers at Central Piedmont Community College conducted a longitudinal study of students' progress through the college curriculum as it related to placement test scores. The following numbers of students comprised the…

The Advanced Placement Program reports grades to students and colleges on a 1 to 5 point scale derived from combining the separate scores on the multiple-choice and free-response sections of Advanced Placement Examinations (ADPEs). In this study, predictions of grades in first-semester college biology courses were made based on students' separate…

A longitudinal study was designed to develop and evaluate a screening instrument of developmental delay based on parental assessment of 18-month-old children. The reliability and validity of a parental screening instrument based on the Griffiths Mental Developmental Scale was investigated with a sample of 2,783 Swedish children out of a population…

The validity of teacher locus of control (TLOC) as measured by an instrument adapted for this purpose was studied. The construct refers to the individual's perception that changes in his or her environment result from internal or external factors. An adaptation of a scale developed by R. C. Taylor et al. (1981) was used to measure TLOC. The first…

A 32-item Computer Self-Efficacy Scale (CSE) was developed to measure perceptions of capability regarding specific computer-related knowledge and skills. Bandura's theory of self-efficacy (1986) and Schunk's model of classroom learning (1985) guided the development of the CSE. Each of the skill-related items is preceded by the phrase "I feel…