Past research on the effects of Minimum Competency Tests (MCT) on teaching and learning is reviewed, and the large database of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is used to shed more light on these effects. There seems to be little doubt that MCT, together with associated changes in instructional methods, has produced some…

Issues surrounding the statewide competency testing of at-risk students are discussed. Sanctions, such as negative evaluations of educational programs associated with such tests, used to fall most heavily on schools and staff, but tests are increasingly becoming prerequisites for promotion and graduation, with increasing impact on students.…

In 1990, a study was conducted to compare the College Level Academic Skills Test (CLAST) passing rates of St. Petersburg Junior College (SPJC) students with those of other Florida community college students and students from state universities. The SPJC samples consisted of 756 students who took the CLAST for the first time in October 1989 and…

Increasing numbers of state-mandated testing programs have resulted in the selection of norm-referenced tests (NRTs) for statewide assessment. Adaptation or customization of existing tests has become a viable solution for individual programs. Changes in test instruments have arisen from the behaviorist approach and mastery learning, minimum…

The Knoxville City Schools (KCS) Proficiency Project ran from fall 1984 to spring 1987 in three Knoxville, Tennessee, middle schools and three high schools. Students in three of the eight KCS high schools were scoring consistently lower than pupils in the other schools on the grade 9 State Proficiency Test, especially in math (M) and language arts…

Participants in this conference of educators, convened to consider methods of evaluating teacher education students, focused upon the relationship between candidate quality and teacher effectiveness. Questions under consideration included: (1) pre-admission field experiences students should demonstrate; (2) optimum scores on aptitude and…

For more than 20 years, the benefits of international mobility for students have been taken for granted. Now, policy makers and educators have started to realize that internationalization and globalization do not magically happen by sending ever higher numbers of students abroad. The quality of international mobility has taken center stage of the…

This report presents Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills (TEAMS) student performance results for the 1989-90 school year. Data are aggregated and reported for the state as a whole, for various student and district demographic groupings, for school districts, and for individual campuses. Section I provides an executive summary of…

Ninth grade results from the April 1989 administration of the New Jersey High School Proficiency Test (HSPT) are reported. Passing the HSPT, which consists of reading, writing, and mathematics sections, is a high school graduation requirement in New Jersey. In 1989, the HSPT was administered to 67,099 ninth, 6,352 10th, 3,018 11th, and 762 12th…

The Iowa Norming Study determined how well graduating high school seniors (N=722) performed on the revised 1988 Tests of General Educational Development (GED), providing the data to describe and evaluate the score requirements for GED Test candidates in terms of the percentage of Iowa high school graduates a GED Test candidate must exceed to…

An introduction by Barbara S. Plake and Joseph C. Witt defines the task of this book as presenting nine conference papers discussing probable directions for the field of measurement and testing. In an effort to contribute to the improvement of test construction and test usage, areas of present concern and potentially important areas for the future…

The 1986-87 graduating classes of public high schools in New Jersey were the third set of classes that had to satisfy the state's High School Graduation Requirements Law (Chapter 241). Data reported by the districts are summarized, although no individual district data are presented. The statewide graduation requirements include: (1) passing a…

The literature on essay testing, and particularly the selection of topics which will stimulate the writing of essays, was reviewed in order to recommend a set of specifications that will produce topics that are maximally fair to all teacher certificate candidates. It was found that by far the greater part of the research relating to writing…

The Vermont Basic Competency Program is described, and its assessment results are reported for its second year of implementation. Data were collected on students in Vermont who were born in 1963, who are in the high school class of 1981 (which will be the first class to require mastery of 51 basic competencies for graduation), and who have already…

This report presents Fall, 1991 results of the New Jersey College Basic Skills Placement Testing which tests incoming college students and evaluates collegiate remedial courses. A summary of the findings notes that freshmen recorded poorer results on every section of the test compared to 1990 results, that in verbal skills 42 percent lacked…