This inaugural volume of our Spotlight Series features recent "Harvard Education Letter" articles on testing and new reports never before published on this important topic. Contributors address such issues as how educators can manage the "avalanche" of tests; whether the benefits of high-stakes tests justify the risks to…

The purpose of this study was to review the spectrum of musico-aesthetic attitude tests by categorizing several according to their approach and the attributes they attempt to measure. (Author)

A sample of 162 fifth grade students were grouped as good, average, and poor readers on the basis of a standardized reading test to determine whether a relationship existed between binocularity and reading performance. (Author/MC)

Results of this study provide strong evidence for the position that social aggressiveness can accurately be considered as a personality trait; that is, peer ratings of aggressiveness describe a recognizable component of a person's behavior which is consistent across situations. (Author)

Study was conducted on the hypothesis that a positively formulated instruction leads to a more positive answer than a neutral instruction and that this in turn leads to a more positive answer than a negative instruction. (Editor)

A review of early and modern work concerned with response-contingent testing and a discussion of its applications, limitations, and future prospects is provided. (KM)

The purpose of the present study is to determine if certain educational procedures have an effect on students' self-concept. (Author)

The post-World War II rehabilitation of large numbers of psychologically deprived and socially maladjusted teenaged war orphans and/or concentration camp victims in Israel was carried out within normal group structures. (Author)

The hypothesis confirmed in this study is that high test-anxiety students performed more poorly on difficult material because they divided their time between personally relevant and task relevant concerns more than did low-anxiety individuals. (Author/KM)

Deaf elementary school children were administered the Leiter International Performance Scale and the five nonauditory, nonverbal subtests of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities. The intellectual quotient derived from the Leiter and the psycholinguistic quotient derived from the five visually oriented subtests were then correlated. The…

Some obvious difficulties of teaching and testing history as inquiry are reviewed. Examples of test items that require students to utilize thought processes developed through inquiry teaching are presented together with a rationale for their use. Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives is proposed as a useful tool in test construction. (SM)