The realities of inappropriate and sometimes unethical testing practices must be confronted to make sure that current assessments are as reliable and effective as possible. While this paper does not attempt to provide practical guidelines for ethical and appropriate testing, it does draw a picture of appropriate and ethical testing practices. All…

The purpose of the Time-Out Parent Inventory (TOPI) is to provide an objective and quantitative assessment of a parent's self-reported use of time-out procedures to manage a child's behavior. The TOPI is intended to be a tool for researchers as well as professionals who help parents and children. The professional asks the parent a series of 12…

In 1991 the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) released a report interpreting the achievement of U.S. students in mathematics on the 1990 National Assessment of Educational Progress in terms of a set of performance standards. The NAGB had been designing and implementing an approach to defining basic, proficient, and advanced levels of…

In the fall of 1992, the National Association of Test Directors (NATD) surveyed its members on their involvement in the development of performance assessments and scoring rubrics. The extent to which members have developed performance assessments is reported, along with how they went about it, the advice they would offer others who are developing…

The two-part activity outlined in this paper reveals to undergraduate students that assumptions made in theory building remain unquestioned until one steps outside the initial realm of expectations, and that theories adopted have a demonstrable impact on behaviors. Part I defines a theory, describes the roles of assumptions and knowledge in…

When response set is present, instead of responding to the intent of the question, the subject appears to be responding to a variable emanating from some personal characteristic. This threat to measurement reliability and validity warrants investigation of the source of response set so that questionnaire designers can minimize its occurrence. This…

This paper presents a study of primary and secondary mathematics teachers' changing assessment practices in the context of policy, stakeholder, and personal presses for change. Two cohorts of teachers, one of 35 elementary, middle school, and high school teachers and the other of 24 elementary and middle school teachers participated. Using survey…

A concept-map assessment consists of a task that elicits structured knowledge, a response format, and a scoring system. Variation in tasks, response formats, and scoring systems produce different mapping techniques that may elicit different knowledge representations, posing construct-interpretations challenges. This study examined two mapping…

This report describes the development of a rating scale and direct observation measure to monitor the treatment of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) in the home or school setting. The study applied an accuracy-reliability paradigm to validate the newly created rating scale and observation measure. An incontrovertible index using a scripted…

President Clinton, like President Bush before him, has challenged the nation's schools to participate in a rigorous national test of each student's reading skills at grade 4 and mathematics skills at grade 8. Tests would be voluntary and administered by private testing companies. They would allow parents to judge the adequacy of their child's…

This digest reviews the basic building blocks of a structured interview, points out some of the pitfalls in interviewing, and suggests ways for researchers to avoid these difficulties to produce questions that have the best possibility of generating reliable and accurate data on the topics of interest. The data collection instrument is a document…

The nine-volume Survey Kit is designed to help readers prepare and conduct surveys and become better users of survey results. All the books in the series contain instructional objectives, exercises and answers, examples of surveys in use, illustrations of survey questions, guidelines for action, checklists of "dos and don'ts," and…

In this paper, a mathematical programming approach is presented for the assembly of ability tests measuring multiple traits. The values of the variance functions of the estimators of the traits are minimized, while test specifications are met. The approach is based on Lagrangian relaxation techniques and provides good results for the two…

This study was conducted to examine how old and very old people cope with the difficult situations in their lives. The main goals of the study were to develop a measure for the identification of coping patterns in the old and very old, identify coping patterns, and investigate those patterns with respect to age and subjective well-being.…

The current emphasis on educational reform recognizes the importance of effective teachers as a basic component of quality schools. Current research is focusing on the characteristics of effective teachers. Self-efficacy, a component of social learning theory, has been shown to affect performance in many different areas. This study is the first…