Following employers' criticisms and recent societal developments, policymakers and educators have called for students to develop a range of generic skills such as critical thinking ("twenty-first century skills"). So far, such skills have typically been assessed by student self-reports or with multiple-choice tests. An alternative…

In order to remain relevant and useful, testing programs must periodically update their tests to match shifts in student populations and school curricula. One might think that because the publishers are offering a product, the responsibility for updates rests entirely on them. Publishers conduct studies to assure new content is appropriate. But…

Special preparation for tests has been a relatively contentious issue. The controversy has entailed (a) disagreement over the effectiveness of such preparation, (b) concern over unequal access to it, and (c) worries about its impact on the validity of test scores. This paper provides a brief history of ETS's involvement with, and contribution to,…

Physics education researchers have scientifically established the fact that the understanding of new concepts and interpretation of incoming information are strongly influenced by the preexisting knowledge and beliefs of students, called epistemological beliefs. This can lead to a gap between what students actually learn and what the teacher…

Quantitative literacy has been recognized as an important skill in the higher education and workforce communities, focusing on problem solving, reasoning, and real-world application. As a result, there is a need by various stakeholders in higher education and workforce communities to evaluate whether college students receive sufficient training on…

The College English Test (CET) is an English language test designed for educational purposes, administered on a very large scale, and used for making high-stakes decisions. This paper discusses the key issues facing the CET during the course of its development in the past two decades. It argues that the most fundamental and critical concerns of…

The influence of metacognition on learning and problem solving has been demonstrated, and it is becoming increasingly clear that promoting metacognitive activity can produce substantial improvements in problem solving and learning in chemistry. This article reports the development and validation of an instrument designed to evaluate students'…

The supervisor-doctoral student interpersonal relationship is important for the success of a PhD-project. Therefore, information about doctoral students' perceptions of their relationship with their supervisor can be useful for providing detailed feedback to supervisors aiming at improving the quality of their supervision. This paper describes the…

The report presents a summary of selected quantitative measures for August 1987 through July 1988 of students who applied for University of Florida graduate school admission, those who were accepted by academic departments, and those who subsequently enrolled. A brief introduction and listing of procedural assumptions precede the two figures and…

This report of the California State Postsecondary Education Commission discusses standardized testing at the higher education level in California and is comprised of three parts. Part 1 describes six tests related to undergraduate admission, placement, and financial assistance. Part 2 describes five tests required by graduate programs and…

Comparisons are made of the results of administering the same Objective Structured Clinical Examination-type clinical skills tests to two cohorts of the Ontario Pre-Internship Program. A description is provided of entry-exit comparisons between the test results of the two cohorts. (GLR)

Iowa State University explored the reliability of the Educational Testing Service's Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit (SPEAK) and an in-house tool as a good predictor of acceptable classroom performance by nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants and studied the relationship between the assistants' background characteristics and…

This article reports on the development of a qualitative career assessment activity, the My System of Career Influences (MSCI) Reflection Activity. The article describes the process of developing and testing the instrument. The testing was conducted in two stages with adults and adolescents. Findings from Stage 1 indicate that the MSCI (pilot…

In Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesian (BI) is the designated national and official language. However, deficiencies in Indonesian proficiency are found in a wide range of individuals. A test battery to measure proficiency level was developed, consisting of a writing test, a grammar test, and a cloze test. The writing test was an essay, in which five…

Reviews "C-testing" in theory and practice and discusses its application in baseline and progress testing of the English of postgraduate students of engineering, technology, and management attending pre-master's programs in Bangkok, Thailand. A problem related to the reliability of pre-and post-course testing arose and the tests were…