The purpose of this article of reflection is to raise awareness of how poor design of language assessments may have detrimental effects, if crucial qualities and technicalities of test design are not met. The article first discusses these central qualities for useful language assessments. Then, guidelines for creating listening assessments, as an…

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation spawned a plethora of standardized testing services for all the high stakes testing required by the law. We argue that one-size-fits all assessments disadvantage students who are English Language Learners, in the USA, as well as students with limited economic resources, special needs, and not reading on…

Formula scoring is designed to reduce multiple-choice test score irregularities due to guessing. It is inappropriate for most classroom testing, but may be desirable for speeded tests and difficult tests with low passing scores. An annotated bibliography and a Self-Test are provided. (SLD)

Essay tests are easily constructed, relatively valid assessments of higher cognitive processes but are harder to score reliably. Teachers using essay tests are advised to follow clearly designed objectives, construct all-inclusive, pilot-tested questions, develop a checklist of specific scoring points and a model answer for each question, and use…

Presuming that test scores can accurately reflect educational quality is naive and potentially dangerous. Sophisticated statistical procedures cannot fully separate the effects of confounding background variables (ethnicity, language proficiency, or poverty) from test scores. A broad-based assessment model relying on multiple indices and…

Effects of blind guessing on the success of passing true-false and multiple-choice tests are investigated under a stochastic binomial model. Critical values of guessing are thresholds which signify when the effect of guessing is negligible. By checking a table of critical values assembled in this paper, one can make a decision with 95% confidence…

Characterizing this special "Kappan" section on test-based accountability as a cautionary plea, this article sees five themes: tests seldom measure what matters; standardization gets confused with standards; tests constitute a limited reform lever; test-based accountability plans often misplace trust and protection; and the…

Alternate versions of Hutchinson's theory were compared, and one which implies the existence of partial knowledge was found to be better than one which implies that an appropriate measure of ability is obtained by applying the conventional correction for guessing. (Author/PN)

A multiple choice test item is identified as flawed if it has no single best answer. In spite of extensive quality control procedures, the administration of flawed items to test-takers is inevitable. Common strategies for dealing with flawed items in conventional testing, grounded in the principle of fairness to test-takers, are reexamined in the…

The problems of validity and fairness involved in multiple-choice critical thinking tests can be lessened by using verbal reports of examinees' thinking during the process of developing such tests in order to retain only those items which rely on critical thinking skills to obtain the correct answer. Multiple-choice testing can lead to unfair…

Today's teachers are unprepared to meet increasingly complex assessment challenges. The poor state of assessment literacy arises from naive assumptions about standardized testing and student motivation, fear of being held accountable for student achievement, parents' nostalgic views of testing, and confusion over achievement expectations for high…

Study skills books sometimes give conflicting advice concerning whether or not students should change their initial responses to multiple-choice questions about which they are unsure. In contrast, answer-changing research consistently shows that the majority of answer changes are from wrong to right. Responses of 244 community college students to…

Brief explanations are presented of some of the different methods used to score multiple-choice tests; and some studies of partial information, guessing strategies, and test-taking behaviors are reviewed. Studies are grouped in three categories of effort to improve scoring: (1) those that require extra effort from the examinee to answer…

The relationship of an expert-system-scored constrained free-response item type to multiple-choice and free-response items was studied using data for 614 students on the College Board's Advanced Placement Computer Science (APCS) Examination. Implications for testing and the APCS test are discussed. (SLD)

Test taking and scoring are examined from the normative and descriptive perspectives of judgment and decision theory. The number-right scoring rule is endorsed because it discourages omissions and is robust against variability in respondent motivations, item vagaries, and limitations in judgments of uncertainty. (SLD)