This commentary discusses three essential themes in performance assessment and its scoring. First, scores should mean something. Second, performance scores should permit fair and meaningful comparisons. Third, validity-reducing errors should be minimal. Increased attention to performance assessment may overcome these problems. (SLD)

Equating a new standard test to an old reference test is considered when samples for equating are not randomly selected from the target population of test takers, identifying two problems from equating from biased samples. An empirical example with data from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery illustrates the approach. (SLD)

Reviewed is the research of Dr. Phyllis Rosser and the comments made by several speakers at a hearing on gender bias in testing held in October 1989. Discussed are historical perspectives, the gender gap in testing, and possible explanations for this gap. Sample test items are provided. (CW)

The tide is slowly turning against prevailing forms of student assessment. The Primary Language Record, a whole-language-based system that assesses elementary students' literacy skills, assumes that all children can learn and that diversity and multilingualism are valuable assets. A sidebar details FairTest's criticisms of standardized testing.…

The original MMPI was criticized as being invalid with minority populations. When the revised MMPI-2 was administered to 400 Mexican American and Anglo American college students, the groups differed significantly on most content scales and several validity and clinical scales. However, absolute score differences were not so large as to preclude…

Discusses the problem of racial inequities inherent in the Scholastic Aptitude Test structure. The author argues that the origin of the test is based on racism and devised to confirm racist assumptions and that it is simultaneously being used to develop merit criteria for college admission. (GLR)

The Chinese revision of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale was factor analyzed for 55 Chinese subjects with mental retardation. Results indicated a two-factor solution comprising Verbal Comprehension and Perceptual Organization factors. Analysis found no important differences in factor structure between the Chinese subjects and low-intelligence…

Educational reforms will not automatically have the same effects for native English speakers and English language learners (ELLs). Equitable assessment for ELLs must consider equity issues of assessment technologies, provide information on ELLs' developing language abilities and content-area achievement, and be comprehensive, flexible, progress…

When English-language standard norms were used for 50 Hispanic Americans given the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised (D. Wechsler, 1981) in its Spanish form, normal individuals received scores an average of one standard deviation below "Average." Results support renorming and testing the validity of translations of English language tests.…

WISC-III scores of 233 students (ages 9 to 13) with mental retardation were examined. Boys had higher Full Scale, Verbal, and Performance IQs than did girls. Boys also had higher scores on six of the 10 subtests. In addition, all of the statistically significant differences were in favor of boys. (Author/CR)

The comparative validity of Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) scores for 123 African American and 561 Caucasian clients from a community mental health center was studied by contrasting mean MMPI-2 scores and correlations between these scores and therapists' ratings. Correlations were not significantly different for racial…

In the present paper, a new family of item response theory (IRT) models for dichotomous item scores is proposed. Two basic assumptions define the most general model of this family. The first assumption is local independence of the item scores given a unidimensional latent trait. The second assumption is that the odds-ratios for all item-pairs are…

A note from the Working Group of the Joint Committee on Testing Practices: The "Code of Fair Testing Practices in Education (Code)" prepared by the Joint Committee on Testing Practices (JCTP) has just been revised for the first time since its initial introduction in 1988. The revision of the Code was inspired primarily by the revision of…

The aim of this work was to determine, in terms of Type I and Type II error rates, the risks of applying various statistical procedures for evaluating differential item functioning. To this end, the authors carried out a simulation study in which the Mantel-Haenszel and SIBTEST procedures were applied in conjunction. The variables manipulated were…

C. M. Steele and J. Aronson (1995) showed that making race salient when taking a difficult test affected the performance of high-ability African American students, a phenomenon they termed stereotype threat. The authors document that this research is widely misinterpreted in both popular and scholarly publications as showing that eliminating…