Efforts were undertaken to develop a parental interview for determining parenting style of parents of children of all ages and children within several subcultural groups. The interview provided mothers with descriptions of common situations in the home and asked the mothers to choose specific responses representing the following parenting styles:…

This document provides statements presented at the oversight hearing on testing and assessment evaluation to improve learning in the nation's schools. Walter Haney summarizes the National Commission on Testing and Public Policy's recent report, which concluded that while well-designed and responsibly used assessment is an important source of…

The construction of objective tests for native language reading comprehension is described. The tests were designed for the early secondary school years in several kinds of schools, vocational and non-vocational. The description focuses on the use of the Rasch model in test development, to develop a large pool of homogenous items and establish…

The approach used to teach English in Japanese high schools is evaluated from the perspective of the skills needed for the university entrance examinations. The tests are examined for item type and for the skills and learning processes needed to answer them. An extensive graded reading program is most appropriate to prepare students for these…

Two approaches to testing student achievement are discussed: (1) traditional standardized tests; and (2) testing achievement on an instructional unit. Content validity is a major problem with standardized achievement tests. Even though test publishers typically consider a number of curriculum guides and textbooks in producing a test which is…

The oral interaction examination used by Britain's Royal Society of Arts for testing communicative use of English as a foreign language is described. The underlying principles of the test, its structure, administration, issues of reliability and validity, and scoring are outlined. Three components of the test itself are included. One component is…

This handbook resulted from a project to develop a tape-based alternative test of language proficiency in less commonly taught languages. The objective was to produce a test that is modeled on and readily interpretable by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages/Interagency Language Roundtable (ACTFL/ILR) proficiency guidelines…

This study compared student performance on language-usage test items presented in two different formats: as discrete sentences and as items embedded in passages. American College Testing (ACT) Program's Assessment experimental units were constructed that presented 40 items in the two different formats. Results suggest item presentation may not…

Pronunciation is regarded as a valuable subskill in foreign language teaching and testing. Its quality is commonly assessed in a global way by having examinees read aloud. An atomistic test is a more systematic and explicit approach. Such a test would consist of about 40 items, use recorded performances, and draw on an inventory of pronunciation…

This paper describes the development, validation, and use of a research instrument, the College and University Classroom Environment Inventory (CUCEI), designed to assess the environment of small higher education classrooms. The instrument evaluates students' or instructors' perceptions of the following seven psychosocial dimensions of actual or…

The problem of measuring growth across the target grade and, typically, the two adjacent grades, concerns most developers of standardized, norm-referenced achievement tests, particularly at the item selection stage. Opinion is divided on whether to retain or drop items that do not get easier from grade to grade. The controversy has focused on…

A project was conducted in Florida between October 1, 1984, and August 31, 1985, to develop and field test criterion-referenced tests in the occupational areas of gardening/groundskeeping and landscape operations. The test instruments were constructed around the performance standards developed by the Florida Department of Vocational Education.…

The New York City Board of Education's Comprehensive Instructional Management Systems-Communication Arts (CIMS-CA) project is described in this report. The introductory section provides background information on the project (implemented in 1980), the primary goal of which was to develop a holistic communication arts curriculum for kindergarten…

The process used by the Texas Education Agency to update public school teacher certification tests in a statewide program in Texas is described. The testing program implemented is called the Examination for the Certification of Educators in Texas. After a policy review, advisory committees for 63 test areas prepared content frameworks, created…

Sex-related bias on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) was studied in a sample of 1,112 students in SAT coaching classes who took the SAT. Of these, 1,028 answered an additional questionnaire (Appendix A of this report) about high school grade point average, perceived abilities, and background. Almost all of the subjects were 11th graders (97.8%),…