How best to use college entrance test score information in making decisions that affect both students and institutions is a complex issue. This booklet offers guidelines developed by member councils and panels of the College Board on the appropriate uses of test scores. The guidelines describe how the College Board interprets its own…

This guide--written for school administrators, teachers, counselors, parents, and the community--describes educational tests and measurements and test-related statistics. While specifically intended to help readers interpret the tests administered in the Los Angeles (California) Unified School District, this information may also be used to…

Presents the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) position statement and administrative and teacher guidelines on the selection, use, and interpretation of standardized tests in the testing of young children (ages three to eight years). (BB)

Should law schools decide to consider other than traditional academic student characteristics as admission criteria, the Law School Admission Council should undertake an extensive research program to design new instruments measuring a broad and perhaps more relevant range of applicant characteristics and skills. (MSE)

Rank-difference correlations between Memory-for-Designs test, Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), and Wide Range Achievement Test scores for two classes of educable mentally retarded children showed high negative correlations between Memory-for-Designs and WISC Full Scale IQs. Visual memory accounted for 84 percent of variance in…

This study of curriculum-based assessment of the reading ability of four elementary-level students with learning disabilities found that individual-referenced tests are powerful for understanding instructional effects, whereas norm-referenced tests are best suited for determining deployment and allocation of resources. (DB)

Content areas that should be included in testing and measurement courses, subsidiary skills, and means of rationalizing the content and skills are outlined. Areas include basic concepts, assessment uses, assessment planning and development, interpretation of assessments, description of results, evaluation and improvement of assessments, feedback…

The purpose of this digest is to describe school counselors' roles in the area of assessment through an historical review of testing in counseling, and to report on study findings regarding roles employers require school counselors to perform. Knowledge needed by counselors to obtain evidence, evaluate its usefulness, and interpret its meaning…

Starting with the ninth grade, Hawaiian students are given the opportunity to take the Hawaii State Test of Essential Competencies (HSTEC) to demonstrate mastery of 14 Essential Competencies. These competencies are grouped into those covering the Basic Skills area and those covering the Other Life Skills area (e.g., distinguishing fact from…

A method for translating the achievement gains in Normal Curve Equivalents (NCE) to a more conceptually understandable index of academic growth is described. This method calculates "Expected Growth (EG)" and expresses the relationship of observed achievement gains. The method is shown to be easily applied and well suited to local…

This study examines the relationship between student mobility and achievement test results in predominately Black and Hispanic Community School District 17, Brooklyn, New York. The project is designed to assess the impact of mobility on pupil achievement and the interpretation of achievement data, as well as to map the pupil population mobility. A…

Designed for helping teachers improve classroom instruction with the help of tests, this handbook highlights the different kinds of tests that indicate important things about student performance: (1) teacher-made tests used to assess student learning; (2) diagnostic tests, prepared by a test publishing company; (3) achievement tests, prepared and…

How standardized achievement and mental ability tests are used in the schools, and what parents and teachers think about such testing, were investigated. Guided inventories were administered to 207 teachers from 10 schools and to 223 parents from 12 Parent-Teacher Association groups. Intensive individual interviews were conducted with 15 testing…

Scores on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) were compared with reevaluation scores obtained four years later on the WAIS-Revised for a group of 108 mildly and moderately retarded adults. The moderately retarded subgroups (N=22) demonstrated significantly higher WAIS-R intelligence quotients. Implications for use of the WAIS-R are…

A sample (N=37) of currently published achievement tests was surveyed as to the availability of five types of technical data: (1) item selection techniques; (2) standardization; (3) types of norms; (4) types of validating data; and (5) types of reliability data. Recommendations for publishers and cautions for test users are given. (BS)