This text was written to help the reader acquire a base of knowledge about classical psychometrics and to integrate new ideas into that framework of knowledge. The material is organized into five units: (1) introduction to measurement theory; (2) reliability; (3) validity; (4) item analysis in test development; and (5) test scoring and…

The validity and reliability of aggregating individuals' perceptions of college organizational characteristics to more macro units of analysis were examined. The focus was the extent to which data collected in a national study met the internal consistency criterion for aggregating perceptual data to the institution level. The study assessed key…

The major finding of the Law-Related Education Evaluation Project report for Year 1 (1981), that law-related education courses can reduce juvenile delinquency, is of limited use to educational decision makers and could be misleading. The research design leaves much to be desired; however, that fact must be considered in light of the difficulty of…

The average design effects for statistics estimated from the base-year National Longitudinal Study data are presented. Attempts to partition the effects into those due to stratification, clustering, and unequal weighting are discussed. The expected increases in subpopulation sample sizes due to oversampling are calculated and compared with the…

The ratings of 43 third-year medical students were used to investigate a method of computing the reliability of ratings. The students were evaluated on a four-point rating scale along seven dimensions of clinical ability: diagnostic ability; motivation; sense of responsibility; oral-verbal ability; effectiveness with patients; ability to take a…

Two methods of item selection were used to select sets of 40 items from a 50-item verbal analogies test, and the resulting item sets were compared for relative efficiency. The BICAL program was used to select the 40 items having the best mean square fit to the one parameter logistic (Rasch) model. The LOGIST program was used to select the 40 items…

This final report presents a description of a test combining cloze procedure and an entropy analysis (CLOZENTROPY), designed to measure the compatibility of a foreign student's English with that of his peers who are native speakers of English. This test, and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) were administered to 48 foreign students…

A novel scoring procedure was investigated in order to obtain scores from a conventional multiple-choice test that would be free of the guessing component or contain a known guessing component even though examinees were permitted to guess at will. Scores computed with the experimental procedure are based not only on the number of items answered…

Responses on both the state and trait scales of the State-Trait Anxiety (STAI) Inventory were examined under two conditions. The first condition presented a simulated real-life situation containing competitive and evaluative cues without directly suggesting faking and asked subjects to complete the STAI. After an intervening task, the STAI was…

Performance testing often entails the usage of expensive, time-consuming measures in the quest for determining the level of performance on some desired behavior. It is concluded that a generalizability theory approach to dealing with departures from reality in testing can aid in the establishment of empirically-based choices of measurement…

The effectiveness of test adaptation based on item selection and reordering of a Spanish (Mexican) version of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) was examined. Translated forms were administered to a sample of Mexican students. One item from each pair (A and B) was selected and reordered using a priori rules. The revised instrument was…

The purpose of this study was to construct and validate a self-rating scale which can be easily administered and quickly scored for discriminating between those high school students who will dropout and those who will not. A 34-item scale was constructed for subjects with a fifth grade reading level. This scale was administered to 113 high school…

The extent of error likely to occur with each of several approximations for the standard deviation, internal consistency reliability, and the standard error of measurement is analyzed. Approximations were compared with exact statistics obtained on 85 different classroom tests constructed and administered by professors in a variety of fields. Means…

Multiple regression equations predicting first semester grade point average (GPA) from high school percentile rank (HSPR) and Composite score on the American College Test (ACT:C) were examined for five successive fall freshman classes (1965-1969) at the University of Illinois. Slopes were significantly different among the five equations. Further…

An investigation was conducted to determine the effects of response-category weighting and item weighting on reliability and predictive validity. Response-category weighting refers to scoring in which, for each category (including omit and "not read"), a weight is assigned that is proportional to the mean criterion score of examinees selecting…