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…

The topic of physical and chemical changes is one of the basic and essential issues of both the lowersecondary school science curriculum and the upper-secondary school chemistry curriculum in many countries. The focus of the present study is to investigate the students' cognitive structures on the topic of physical and chemical changes at…

This article aims to give a comprehensive guide to planning and designing vocabulary tests which include Identifying the skills to be covered by the test; outlining the course content covered; preparing a table of specifications that shows the skill, content topics and number of questions allocated to each; and preparing the test instructions. The…

Cooper et al. (this issue) develop an interactive activation model of spatial and imitative compatibilities that simulates the key results from Catmur and Heyes (2011) and thus conclude that both compatibilities are mediated by the same processes since their single model can predict all the results. Although the model is impressive, the…

This study investigates aspects of validity of an alternative measure of productive vocabulary. Lex30, developed by Meara and Fitzpatrick, is a word association task that claims to give an indication of productive vocabulary knowledge. Previous studies of Lex30 have assessed test-retest reliability, performance against native speaker norms,…

An adaptation of the Fluency in Controlled Association subtest of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination was administered to language-disordered (N=123) and non-disabled (N=286) kindergarten through ninth-grade students. Lack of significant differences on this task suggests that it may not be an appropriate screening device for identifying…

Students watching instructional television become visually oriented to the material presented, learning it by visual rather than verbal association. Yet most tests given to determine student comprehension are verbal. To resolve this inconsistency, the author proposes visual testing, a procedure which he explains and whose usefulness he illustrates…

The Mini Rat (Remote Associates Test) was developed in response to the need for creativity measures with which one could study the consequences of elementary school teaching on the students' creative potential. It is an associative measure with 20 items in which children are asked to give verbal responses to word doublets in the form of third…

The forty minute Remote Associates Test (RAT) is designed to measure individual differences in an ability considered to be fundamental to the creative thinking process. It is based on a strictly associative interpretation of this process, an interpretation which envisions the process as one of seeing relationships between seemingly mutually remote…

Original thinking was examined in 142 middle- and lower-class children across a wide range of age (7-13 years) and intellectual ability (low average to gifted). The instruments were lenient and stringent solution-standard measures of original problem solving and two subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. (Author/PN)

One way of determining construct validity of vocabulary items in language tests is to interview subjects directly after taking the items to ascertain what is known about the target words in question. This approach was combined within the framework of lexical competency in a study of the behavior of lexical items on the Test of English as a Foreign…

A simply constructed, psychometrically sound testing procedure which enables the instructor to assess higher cognitive process with respect to the material in questions, and which is amenable to machine scoring, is described. It involves the application of the word association technique long used in psychoanalysis to the classroom setting. The…