This digest offers tips on designing questionnaires and on avoiding common design errors. The following useful suggestions are offered: (1) keep the questionnaire brief and concise; (2) get feedback on the initial list of questions developed; (3) locate personal or confidential questions at the end of the questionnaire; (4) put categories in…

This report evaluates the degree to which the achievement level descriptions adopted by the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) for the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessment in mathematics accurately represent what students at a given achievement level can do. Three different analytical approaches were used in…

The work done by the Validation Panel that was commissioned by the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation (Joint Committee) to monitor the development of "The Program Evaluation Standards: How To Assess Evaluations of Educational Programs" is described, and its conclusions summarized. This report focuses on the…

This binder contains the questionnaires used by the Bureau of the Census to conduct the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and the Teacher Followup Survey (TFS) for the National Center for Education Statistics. SASS is a mail survey of teachers, principals, and other administrators. TFS is a mail survey administered one year after the SASS to a…

Projects to develop an automated item banking and test development system have been undertaken on several occasions at the Air Force Human Resources Laboratory (AFHRL) throughout the past 10 years. Such a system permits the construction of tests in far less time and with a higher degree of accuracy than earlier test construction procedures. This…

Constructing a test of English-as-a-Foreign-Language reading comprehension that will accommodate the complete spectrum of performance from beginner to near native speaker can be problematic. Such a test is currently being developed at the Institute for Applied Language Studies at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). With only a few hundred…

The Assessment Clearinghouse of the Memphis (Tennessee) City Public Schools is a collection of performance-based instructional tasks that have been designed to address specific content standards at specific grade levels. The tasks consist of a complete set of instructional and assessment activities for immediate classroom use. They also provide a…

Seven specific guidelines included in the taxonomy proposed by T. Haladyna and S. Downing (1998) for writing multiple-choice test items were evaluated. These specific guidelines are: (1) avoid the complex multiple-choice, K-type format; (2) state the stem in question format; (3) word the stem positively; (4) avoid the phrase "all of the…

The paper presents results of preliminary work in developing a scale to assess attention deficit disorder in a manner that provides educationally useful information. Based in part on B. Keogh and J. Margolis's component analysis of attending skills in learning disabled children (skills of coming to attention, sustaining attention, and making…

A test battery was prepared for use in assessing the effectiveness of Head Start and similar programs in fostering young children's development. The instruments were designed to measure program effects on several dimensions of the cognitive, social-emotional, and applied strategies domains. Specific competencies measured are presumed to define in…

Excerpts from a forthcoming book examining the procedures and results of China's Civil service examinations during the Ch'ing dynasty are provided. (DE)

Describes how to construct reading comprehension test questions that are unanswerable without careful reading of an accompanying passage and provides examples of the principles explained. (RB)

Describes a test for a chronologically organized, issue-centered, multidisciplinary composition course in American civilization. (RB)

Two kinds of objective tests are discribed which are fairly easy to construct and which stress overall language ability and language predictability. Cloze tests involve filling in passages from which every nth word is missing; noise tests the interpretation of recordings on which noise is superimposed. (RM)

Determination of the intentions of the test developer is fundamental to the choice of the analytical model for a rating scale. For confirmatory analysis, the developer's intentions inform the choice of the general form of the model, representing the manner in which the respondent interacts with the scale; these intentions also inform the choice of…