We explored the potential of a robotics application in education as a measurement tool of child executive functioning skills. Sixty-five kindergarteners received assignments to go through a maze with a programmable robot, the Bee-Bot. Via observation we quantified how they solved these tasks. Their performance was successfully aggregated into a…

Agreement among informants' ratings of children's and adults' internalizing and externalizing problems is moderate. Each informant contributes unique information about an individual's problems. Thus, it has been advocated to obtain ratings from multiple sources in child psychiatry, whereas adult psychiatry relies mostly on self-reports.…

This article describes the identification of a 10-item set of the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Personality Disorders (SCID-II) items, which proved to be effective as a self-report assessment instrument in screening personality disorders. The item selection was based on the retrospective analyses of 495 SCID-II interviews. The…

While measurement precision is relatively easy to establish for single tests and assessments, it is much more difficult to determine for decision making with multiple tests on different subjects. This latter is the situation in the system of final examinations for secondary education in the Netherlands and is used as an example in this paper. This…

A 24-item short form of the 96-item Developmental Behaviour Checklist was developed to provide a brief measure of Total Behaviour Problem Score for research purposes. The short form Developmental Behaviour Checklist (DBC-P24) was chosen for low bias and high precision from among 100 randomly selected item sets. The DBC-P24 was developed from…

The use of restrictive factor analysis (RFA) is illustrated with data from the field of educational research. An attitude scale measuring the degree to which students feel they are accepted by their classmates is constructed in accordance with the Theory of Violators. The main idea of the Theory of Violators is that most problems associated with…

This study used a diagnostic testing approach to compare the mathematics achievement of eighth-grade students across a sample of 20 countries, analyzing data from the Third International Math and Science Study-Revised (TIMSS-R, 1999). Using the rule-space method, student mastery was measured on 23 specific content knowledge and processing…

Presented in this symposium reader are nine papers, four of which deal with the theory and impact of the Rasch model on language testing and five of which discuss final examinations in secondary schools in both general and specific terms. The papers are: "Introduction to Rasch Measurement: Some Implications for Language Testing" (J. J.…