Although creativity is considered one of the key "twenty-first-century skills", this ability is still often misunderstood. Persistent conceptual and methodological barriers have limited educational implications. This article reviews and discusses the three critical issues of "nature", "measure", and…

Early childhood educators play a critical role in preparing students for success later in their school experience. The instructional techniques, emotional supports, and assessment approaches for early childhood settings are different from classroom settings in later grades. How can states and districts develop evaluation systems that are tuned to…

In the attempt to identify or prevent unfair tests, both quantitative analyses and logical evaluation are often used. For the most part, fairness evaluation is a pragmatic attempt at determining whether procedural or substantive due process has been accorded to either a group of test takers or an individual. In both the individual and comparative…

This study sought to ascertain the specific assessment strategies used by middle- and high-school choral directors in Georgia to evaluate sight-singing. Data was further gathered to determine which assessment practices choral directors considered to be the most effective. Although there had been previous studies that attempted to determine the…

As item response models gain increased popularity in large-scale educational and measurement testing situations, many studies have been conducted on the development and applications of unidimensional and multidimensional models. Recently, attention has been paid to IRT-based models with an overall ability dimension underlying several ability…

Although pair programming has proved its usefulness in teaching and learning programming skills, it is difficult to assess the individual roles and abilities of students whilst programming in pairs. (Note that within this manuscript, the term assessment refers to evaluating individual student performance.) Assessing only the outcomes of a pair…

The author urges the adoption of take-home exams, whether individual or group efforts, subjective or objective in nature, as they lead to much more reflective thinking, problem solving, and other forms of data analysis than do standard one-period exams. (AN)

Alternatives to a solitary testing format can involve students working in teams to arrive at the correct answer. We compared two group assessment methods, cooperative and competitive, to a solitary testing approach. In most comparisons examining the undergraduate respondents' (N = 77) performance, the two group-testing methods were equivalent.…

A new, more specific language for describing work activities, based upon the duty module (clusters of tasks that tend to go together occupationally and organizationally in meaningful ways) is being designed for the Army. The purpose is to improve communications between resource and requirement planners and program operators. The paper proposes two…

Criterion-referenced measurement (CRM) has received increasing attention in regular education. However, it is in education for handicapped children that CRM's flexibility for individualization of both instruction and evaluation become even more fully realized. Research is described on one of the first CRM systems (Individual Achievement Monitoring…

Describes the Reading Comprehension Interview, an individual interview procedure for gathering information about students' perceptions of classroom reading activities. Explains how it can help teachers gain insights into students' actual reading strategies. Contains a copy of the interview. (FL)

Describes a type of individual laboratory-activity examination developed for use in an undergraduate general physics class whose enrollment was more than 100 persons. Test preparation, procedure, evaluation, and outcomes are discussed. (BT)

A model for assessing the developmental skills of handicapped children is presented, for school psychologists. Stressing the relationship between assessment, intervention, and program evaluation, it is consistent with Public Law 94-142. Three assessment methods are recommended: parent interview, observation, and adaptive use of standardized tests.…

Examined how well three measures, representing points on a traditional-alternative mathematics assessment continuum, discriminated fourth graders achieving above, at, and below grade level, and how cooperative testing affected performance assessment. Found strong discriminative validity for the more traditional measures but not for performance…