The legislation mandating Louisiana's Basic Skills Test was consistent with federal legislation in specifically including special education students. The development of policy alternatives for the testing of these students, however, was a complex process. Related issues include: (1) inclusion/exclusion of special education students, (2)…

As part of the current trend toward adopting modern, objective-standardized test methods in evaluating the teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) in the schools of the Socialist Republic of Romania, this review of pedagogical literature makes available to the English-reading audience information that has appeared in Romanian materials.…

This book is intended to help instructors construct reading tests. All the chapters are concerned with viewing two complementary aspects of the written text materials that is used as the base for testing: (1) the relations that hold among the parts of a written text that occur together; and (2) the fact that each word in a text plays certain roles…

Standardized achievement tests are often misused as indicators of a school's quality or effectiveness relative to other schools. This is an incorrect use because it ignores variation among schools in student abilities, family support of education, student mobility, and other factors. People also misuse tests because they impute to them more…

This booklet is designed to help parents gain a better understanding of testing and its role in the education of their children. Answers to questions concerning the different types of tests given in schools, differences among these tests, how test results are used, what test scores mean and how the scores affect students are provided. Several…

Issues associated with minimum competency testing are discussed: the national, state, and local context for MCT program development; MCT's potential impact; the use and development of MCT programs; and reactions to the testing programs. Presently, the federal role is described as limited to providing information, research support, and technical…

This study endeavored to determine (1) the reliability with which selected individual tests of language, visual and auditory perception, and auditory-visual perceptual integration can be administered through group testing; (2) the decrease in administration and scoring time by using these instruments in a group manner, and (3) the relationships…

In developing countries, for the most part, traditional methods of selecting students for secondary schools, technical and vocational institutions, teacher training colleges, and universities are unable to ensure that the most capable applicants receive the limited opportunities available. To remedy this situation, the author has assembled and…

Examines the use of clinical interviews as a complement to more typical achievement tests. The research focused on the learning outcomes resulting from second grade students' viewing of television program on magnets. Results indicated that clinical interviews provided evidence of effective instruction when achievement tests did not. (ML)

An ideal assessment of hearing-impaired children includes: case history; medical examination; tests (of intelligence, personality, achievement, communication/language skills, and aptitude); neuropsychological assessment to identify learning strengths and weaknesses; and multidisciplinary team staffing and parent-teacher conferences. Twenty-eight…

The responses of 194 fifth graders to a questionnaire assessing causal attributions, academic expectancies, and self-evaluation of smartness varied as a function of whether the questionnaire was administered individually or in a group. Children expressed lower and less accurate predictions in the individual condition than in the group condition.…

This study seeks to determine whether item features are related to observed differences in item difficulty (DIF) between computer- and paper-based test delivery media. Examinees responded to 60 quantitative items similar to those found on the GRE general test in either a computer-based or paper-based medium. Thirty-eight percent of the items were…

This report offers advice on the issues to be considered and the steps to be taken when implementing a high school graduation test. The research was conducted, specifically, to address problems with Mississippi's high school exit test. An external panel, developed by Southeastern Regional Vision for Education (SERVE), reviewed data obtained…

This paper is based on guidelines developed in 1989 for training workshops for state and local educators to demonstrate the processes by which performance assessments could be created, validated, and used in statewide assessment programs. These guidelines are based on work with the National Assessment of Educational Progress and several statewide…

This paper illustrates how statistical decision theory can be used to model aspects of the effectiveness of a course placement system. The illustration is based on data from students who enrolled in a first-year mathematics course at a midwestern university. To model the placement of students, the author first elicited students' and instructors'…