Rankings of international higher education institutions have become influential, newsworthy metrics worldwide. This is unsurprising given the rising prevalence of cross-national college attendance. This report evaluates the methodologies of three major international ranking systems: the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU, or…

Language testing and assessment have grown in popularity and gained significance in the last few decades, and there is a rising need for assessment literate stakeholders in the field of language education. As teachers play a major role in assessing students, there is a need to make sure they have the right level of assessment knowledge and skills…

Much of the argument about comparability of examination standards is at cross-purposes; contradictory positions are in fact often both defensible, but they are using the same words to mean different things. To clarify this, two broad conceptualisations of standards can be identified. One sees the standard in the observed phenomena of performance…

Robert Coe has claimed that three broad conceptions of comparability can be identified from the literature: performance, statistical and conventional. Each of these he rejected, in favour of a single, integrated conception which relies upon the notion of a "linking construct" and which he termed "construct comparability".…

Developing and using a design for teacher portfolio assessment is a complex process including several components: the domain to be assessed (the teacher competences), the content standards or criteria, the portfolio format, the completion of the format (by teachers) with content, and the scoring of the portfolios (by raters). For a portfolio…

Cultural competence has become a central social work tenet enshrined in the profession's ethical and educational standards. Few measures of cultural competence exist, however, in spite of an increasing array of religious, ethnic, and racial groups in U.S. society. This article develops a new measure to assess cultural competence among one family…

The purpose of this paper is (1) to discuss a set of standards that can be used to evaluate potential assessment instruments; and (2) to use these standards to evaluate the American College Testing Program's College Outcomes Measures Program (ACT-COMP) and the Educational Testing Service (ETS) Academic Profile. Using the work of S. Messick (1975,…