In their reactions to my paper, the four authors provide comments that are illuminating and helpful for continuing discussions of the nature and utility of quantitative, comparative, international studies of educational achievement. In this response, I comment further on the issues of test characteristics, sample design, culture and causation.

This study investigates aspects of validity reflected in a large and diverse sample of published measures used in educational and psychological testing contexts. The current edition of "Mental Measurements Yearbook" served as the data source for this study. The validity aspects investigated included perspective on validity represented, number and…

Physics educators around the world often need reliable diagnostic materials to measure students' understanding of physics concept in high school. The purpose of this study is to evaluate a new diagnostic tool on High School Optics concept. Test of Conceptual Understanding on High School Optics (TOCUSO) consists of 25 conceptual items that measures…

The purpose of this study was to (a) evaluate and discuss strengths and weaknesses in the current system of identifying gifted students and (b) investigate the effectiveness of using the Naglieri Nonverbal Abilities Test to identify underrepresented and gifted minority students in grades one through five in Central Mississippi. The study consisted…

The Guidelines for Good Practice of the European Association for Language Testing and Assessment (EALTA) stress the importance of collaboration between all parties involved in the process of developing instruments, activities and programmes for testing and assessment. Collaboration is considered to be as important as validity and reliability,…

The current study will explore the validity and potential of using the SAT, in conjunction with HSGPA, to arrive at a predicted FYGPA to improve student retention at four-year postsecondary institutions. Specifically, this study examined whether college students who did not perform as expected (observed FYGPA minus predicted FYGPA) were more…

The SAS Educational Value-Added Assessment System (SAS[R] EVAAS[R]) is the most widely used value-added system in the country. It is also self-proclaimed as "the most robust and reliable" system available, with its greatest benefit to help educators improve their teaching practices. This study critically examined the effects of SAS[R] EVAAS[R] as…

Presented at the 23rd Annual Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCU) Conference in Atlanta, GA, in September 2011. Admitted Class Evaluation Service (ACES) is the College Board's free online service that predicts how admitted students will perform at a college or university generally, and how successful students will be in specific…

Development of learning progressions has been at the forefront of science education for several years. While understanding students' conceptual development toward "big ideas" in science is extremely valuable for researchers, science teachers can also benefit from assessment tools that diagnose their students' trajectories along the learning…

This study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of educational television programs in distance learning system. Using the procedure of survey method, this study finds out the worth of educational television programs. Its results are based on the responses of the learners of distance teaching system. The views of students were collected by…

From a contemporary perspective on cognition, the between-persons variables in trait-based arguments in educational assessment are absurd over-simplifications. Yet, for a wide range of applications, they work. Rather than seeing such variables as independently-existing characteristics of people, we can view them as summaries of patterns in…

The goal of this report was to test the use of sensor-based skill measures in evaluating performance differences in rifle marksmanship. Ten shots were collected from 30 novices and 9 experts. Three measures for breath control and one for trigger control were used to predict skill classification. The data were fitted with a logistic regression…

The Science Learning Assessment (SLA) is an individually administered, instructionally sensitive science assessment for kindergarten students. The SLA is a 24-item objective test, broken down into two subtests. The Scientific Inquiry Processes subtest consists of 9 items designed to measure young children's functional understanding of the nature…

Individuals' use of language in contexts emerges from second-to-second processes of activating and integrating traces of past experiences--an interactionist view compatible with the study of language as a complex adaptive system but quite different from the trait-based framework through which measurement specialists investigate validity, establish…

This article describes the development and initial psychometric properties of the Parent Tic Questionnaire (PTQ)--a new measure assessing the number, frequency, and intensity of motor and vocal tics in children and adolescents with Chronic Tic Disorder (CTD). Parents of 40 children with a CTD completed the PTQ as part of a larger assessment…