In standardized educational testing, test items are reused in multiple test administrations. To ensure the validity of test scores, the psychometric properties of items should remain unchanged over time. In this article, we consider the sequential monitoring of test items, in particular, the detection of abrupt changes to their psychometric…

Published work on vocabulary assessment has grown substantially in the last 10 years, but it is still somewhat outside the mainstream of the field. There has been a recent call for those developing vocabulary tests to apply professional standards to their work, especially in validating their instruments for specified purposes before releasing them…

When the coronavirus pandemic was declared a public health crisis in March 2020, school psychologists were forced into situations where face-to-face interaction with their students was discouraged and in some cases, prohibited. Consequently, the traditional practice of school psychology abruptly ended. Individualized Education Plans (IEP) and…

U.S. Supreme Court justices and other federal judges are, effectively, appointed for life, with no built-in check on their cognitive functioning as they approach old age. There is about a century of research on aging and intelligence that shows the vulnerability of processing speed, fluid reasoning, visual-spatial processing, and working memory to…

The changes in the economy and society in this century have placed a greater emphasis on the skills that citizens need to be successful. This diverse set of skills, often referred to as 21st century skills, and including critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, communication, and socio-emotional skills, among others, are in high demand as…

Abilities in scientific thinking and reasoning have been emphasized as core areas of initiatives, such as the Next Generation Science Standards or the College Board Standards for College Success in Science, which focus on the skills the future will demand of today's students. Although there is rich literature on studies of how these abilities…

Programmatic assessment is both a philosophy and a method for assessment. It has been developed in medical education as a response to the limitation of the dominant testing or measurement approaches and to better align with changes in how medical competence was conceptualised. It is based on continual collection of assessment and feedback…

Testing in educational system perform a number of functions, the results from a test can be used to make a number of decisions in education. It is therefore well accepted in the education literature that, testing is an important element of education. To effectively utilize the tests in educational policies and quality assurance its validity and…

Increasingly content area projects and programs at the K-12 level, such as in mathematics, involve a programmatic component or project emphasis on developing "teacher leadership". However, there is no consistent definition or framework for this construct and even fewer validated tools for measuring it. This paper describes our efforts in…

This article discusses critical methodological design decisions for collecting, interpreting, and synthesizing empirical evidence during the design, deployment, and operational quality-control phases for automated scoring systems. The discussion is inspired by work on operational large-scale systems for automated essay scoring but many of the…

Classroom tests provide teachers with essential information used to make decisions about instruction and student grades. A table of specification (TOS) can be used to help teachers frame the decision making process of test construction and improve the validity of teachers' evaluations based on tests constructed for classroom use. In this article…

The argument-based approach to validation involves two steps; specification of the proposed interpretations and uses of the test scores as an interpretive argument, and the evaluation of the plausibility of the proposed interpretive argument. More ambitious interpretations and uses tend to involve an extended network of inferences and assumptions…

Intervention integrity or adherence describes qualities of carrying out an intervention plan and in research is fundamentally linked to experimental validity questions addressed by measurement of independent and dependent variables. Integrity has been well described in conceptual writing but has been a continuing thorny subject in research and…

This research brief highlights findings from the technical report (published separately). Student-level analyses were conducted with the SEL Skills Survey and the Student Climate Survey to determine if a single measure of students' SEL skill acquisition and perceptions of school climate is possible. [For the Technical Report, see ED629195.]

Data driven decision making emphasizes the importance of the teacher using objective sources of information in developing the social studies curriculum. Too frequently, decisions of teachers have been made based on routine and outdated methods of teaching. Valid and reliable tests used to secure results from pupil learning make for better…