The recent proliferation of testing policies in the US has raised concerns about the consequences of "teaching to the test". Current studies of teaching and testing document patterns of teacher resistance and accommodations to external tests, but often fail to examine how these patterns influence teachers' and students' engagement with…

Over many years, both as an educator and as a psychologist, I have been involved with assessing students? knowledge and skills. Since my early years diagnosing students with learning disabilities and other disorders, my viewpoint on the usefulness and effectiveness of many testing approaches has taken a 180-degree turn. In fact, I see many…

This article presents a revised version of the author's Samuel Messick Memorial lecture in 2003. Messick's emphasis on consequential validity is used to identify some of the negative effects of current practices as they affect the quality of students' learning and motivation. It suggests that there have been many 'dark alleys' in which poorly…

As time passes, people often remember the gist of an event though they cannot remember its details. Can rememberers exploit this difference by strategically regulating the ''grain size'' of their answers over time, to avoid reporting wrong information? A metacognitive model of the control of grain size in memory reporting was examined in two…

Signal-detection theory (SDT) accounts of recognition judgments depend on the assumption that recognition decisions result from a single familiarity-based process. However, fits of a hybrid SDT model, called dual-process theory (DPT), have provided evidence for the existence of a second, recollection-based process. In 2 experiments, the authors…

Studies of calibration have shown that people's mean confidence in their answers (local confidence) tends to be greater than their overall estimate of the percentage of correct answers (global confidence). Moreover, whereas the former exhibits overconfidence, the latter often exhibits underconfidence. Three studies present evidence that global…

A computerized adaptive testing (CAT) algorithm that has the potential to increase the homogeneity of CAT's item-exposure rates without significantly sacrificing the precision of ability estimates was proposed and assessed in the shadow-test (van der Linden & Reese, 1998) CAT context. This CAT algorithm was formed by a combination of…

Permitting item review is to the benefit of the examinees who typically increase their test scores with item review. However, testing companies do not prefer item review since it does not follow the logic on which adaptive tests are based, and since it is prone to cheating strategies. Consequently, item review is not permitted in many adaptive…

Across the nation and at nearly all levels of our educational system, efforts to hold schools accountable for student learning dominate strategies for improving the quality of education. At both the national and state level, student testing stands at the center of educational accountability programs, such that schools are effectively held…

This paper reviews the history of technology and testing. The role and functions of computers in education have become more varied, from drill and practice to simple tutorials toWebQuests. However, one important aspect of teaching for which the computer is ideally suited, achievement testing, is often overlooked. While it is not difficult to…

In the Information Communication Technology era teachers will have to wisely use the online environment in order to realize a new pedagogy. The penetration of the internet and collaborative online instruments to teaching and learning affect the quality of teaching. We have developed a digital indicator to evaluate the quality of the online tasks…

In this policy brief, the author explores the problems with attainment measures when it comes to evaluating performance at the school level, and explores the best uses of value-added measures. These value-added measures, the author writes, are useful for sorting out-of-school influences from school influences or from teacher performance, giving…

Employee empowerment has long been associated with organizational outcomes such as innovation, greater effectiveness, and better performance. Non-academic professional employees in higher education are responsible for the important day-to-day operations of a university; therefore, organizational strategies such as employee empowerment that…