Few arguments about education are as effective at galvanizing public attention and motivating political action as those that compare the performance of students with their counterparts in other countries and that connect academic achievement to economic performance. Because data from international large-scale assessments (ILSA) have a powerful…

In February, 1976, the Education Policy Research Institute sponsored this conference on the use of tests in educational policy formation; these six papers were presented at that conference. In the first paper, Jenne K. Britell discusses four points that have historically characterized debates about testing; psychometric and technical issues;…

The idea that validity should be considered a property of inferences, rather than of assessments, has developed slowly over the past century. In early writings about the validity of educational assessments, validity was defined as a property of an assessment. The most common definition was that an assessment was valid to the extent that it…

The nature and common uses of standardized achievement tests are described and placed in context in order to evaluate claims and criticisms that are commonly made. Tests are described as samples of behavior and hence subject to sampling errors. Much of the debate is dominated by emotion and prejudices. There is very little empirical evidence about…

This paper examines a number of issues surrounding the addition of a dimension of international comparisons to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The basic position of the paper is that adding an international dimension to NAEP is certainly possible, but some problems will need to be overcome. Non-issues are identified and…

Not intended to be a technical piece of work in the sense of psychometric innovation, this volume presents a synthesis and summary of over four hundred highly selected reference sources. The objective is to present a gestalt of the perspectives, pitfalls, fallacies, issues, consequences, and trends in the use of standardized norm-referenced tests…