During the past two decades, an increasing number of European countries have introduced language requirements for residency, citizenship, and sometimes even for entry to the country and family reunification. As a result, democratic rights as well as basic human rights have come to depend upon an individual's ability to obtain a certain score on a…

The six primary papers in this issue of "Assessment in Education" emphasise a single primary point: the concept of validity is a complex one. Essentially, validity is a collective noun. That is, just as a group of players may be called a team and a group of geese a flock, so too does validity represent a variety of processes and…

This paper presents the author's critique to Paul E. Newton's article titled "Clarifying the consensus definition of validity." In his article, Newton not only clarifies but also redefines the consensus definition of validity. In this redefinition he omits the term "construct" and introduces the term "measurement." Both omission and introduction…

The 1999 "Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing" defines validity as the degree to which evidence and theory support the interpretations of test scores entailed by proposed uses of tests. Although quite explicit, there are ways in which this definition lacks precision, consistency, and clarity. The history of validity has taught us…

Lissitz and Samuelsen (2007) have proposed an operational definition of "validity" that shifts many of the questions traditionally considered under validity to a separate category associated with the utility of test use. Operational definitions support inferences about how well people perform some kind of task or how they respond to some kind of…

The American Psychological Association, in the late 1940s, began work to establish a code of ethics to include and address the needs of members in scientific and applied fields. Out of the ethics work emerged a set of standards for evaluating psychological tests. Four categories, or types of validity, were identified: content, predictive,…