Background: There is an urgent need for developing reliable, valid and practical instruments that assess and classify the support needed by persons with disability to function in their chosen living, working and social environments. I-CAN is an instrument that addresses the frequency and level of support needed (not individual skills or deficits)…

The authors explored the credibility of using informal reading inventories and writing samples for 138 students (K-4) to evaluate the effectiveness of a summer literacy program. Running Records (a measure of a child's reading level) and teacher experience during daily reading instruction were used to estimate the reliability of the more formal…

A coefficient derived from communalities of test parts represents greatest lower bound to Guttman's "immediate retest reliability." Constrained minimum trace factor analysis allows a consistent estimate of the greatest defensible internal-consistency coefficient. In modest size samples, this analysis capitalizes on chance, suggesting an…

Recommendations are made for the appropriate use and identification of traditional Kuder-Richardson formulas for the estimation of reliability. "Alpha" should be used for reliabilities estimated for tests or scales composed of items yielding scores distributed on more than two points. (SLD)

Interest development is not an easily studied process. There are at least 4 methods for examining the process of stability and change over time: relative stability, absolute stability, profile stability, and structural stability. A program of research that focuses on examining these 4 types of stability is summarized relative to the issues…

The speech intelligibility of 21 hearing-impaired adolescents was measured by the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) rating scale, the Speech Intelligibility Evaluation, and the Speech Intelligibility Test for Deaf Children. The practical advantages and disadvantages of each procedure are discussed and recommendations made for their…

Discusses the pros and cons of objective testing and its difficulties and dangers. (SB)

Reviews the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (Forms E and F) and finds it an easy to use and valid norm-referenced survey test for determining the level of student reading achievement, assessing individual differences, and deriving group means. (AEA)

Investigates validity of the Suicide Assessment Checklist (SAC) in a sample of 1,969 admissions to a psychiatric emergency crisis center. Supporting construct related validity, total score differences were found in the expected directions as a function of referral reason. Convergent validity was based on observed correlations between selected SAC…

Anxiety is one of the most pervasive symptoms seen in clinical psychological disorders. The Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) is a popular measure to assess the construct of anxiety. This study was concerned with an examination of potential study factors that are associated with the variability of the reliability estimates of the BAI scores. A review…

The concern behind my question, "Can there be validity without reliability?" (Moss, 1994), was about the influence of measurement practices on the quality of education. I argued that conventional operationalizations of reliability in the measurement literature, which I summarized as "consistency, quantitatively defined, among independent…

This report is an analysis of the role of assessment portfolios in teacher learning. Over 18 months, 19 experienced science teachers worked in grade-level teams to design, implement, and evaluate assessments to track student learning throughout a curriculum unit, supported by semi-structured tasks and resources in assessment portfolios.…

This paper presents a framework that institutions of higher education can use to improve, revise and introduce comprehensive systems for the collection and dissemination of information on student learning outcomes. For faculty and institutional leaders grappling with the many issues and nuances inherent in assessing student learning, the framework…

Early identification of social-emotional behavioral problems in infants and preschoolers is critical. Nine parent-report and caregiver/teacher-report instruments measuring preschool social-emotional behavioral problems and strengths are reviewed. Advantages to the use of parent-report and caregiver/teacher-report instruments are that they are easy…

Subjective well-being is an increasingly common indicator of adequacy of psychiatric services. An easy-to-administer assessment tool of subjective well-being that is conceptually sound, valid, and reliable is needed for use in persons with schizophrenia. The purpose of this paper was to validate the 5-item Satisfaction with Life Scale…