This technical manual is presented to assist those using the Audit of Principal Effectiveness, an 80-statement evaluation instrument designed to determine teachers' perceptions of principals' effectiveness, allow principals to obtain feedback from teachers regarding strengths and weaknesses, and provide a useful tool for researchers studying…

One of the most ambitious attempts to assess students' understanding of mathematics was carried out in England between 1974 and 1979. The results of this study indicate that there is a need in an overall assessment program to evaluate students' algebraic understanding as well as to measure their achievement in algebraic manipulations and problem…

The Florida Council on Educational Management (FCEM), a 17-member council appointed by the Governor, Senate, and House of Representatives, is central to the present control of public school management in Florida. The duties of the FCEM are to identify: (1) relevant management competencies of school managers; (2) standards and procedures for…

This report provides information on test development, test administration, and score interpretation for the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT). The GMAT, first administered in 1954, provides objective measures of an applicant's abilities for use in admissions decisions by graduate management schools. It is currently composed of five…

Computer adaptive testing systems are feasible for certification and licensure testing. This is in part due to the availability of extensive yet inexpensive computers. Modern item response theory, combined with computerized adaptive testing, yields a powerful new method of testing which provides greater accuracy and efficiency and less boredom for…

The Professional and Administrative Career Examination measures judgment ability using comprehension and logical order of events item types. Since the verbal component of comprehension items is high, and since these items are extremely difficult to write and document, a search was conducted for a simpler item type for assessing judgment. Three…

An experiment was performed with computer-generated data to investigate some of the operational characteristics of tailored testing as they are related to various provisions of the computer program and item pool. With respect to the computer program, two characteristics were varied: the size of the step of increase or decrease in item difficulty…

This book is a practical guide for assessing the intended learning outcomes of classroom instruction. It is based on the premise that assessment of student achievement plays a vital role in instruction and that the main goal of assessment is to improve learning. The new title of this sixth edition reflects a shift from major concern with classroom…

The reliability of Mantel-Haenszel (MH) indexes across samples of examinees and sample sizes and their robustness to item context effects were investigated with data for 670 African-American and 5,015 white students from the Second International Mathematics Study. MH procedures can be used to detect differential item functioning. (SLD)

This instructional training package introduces practitioners to methods for developing, validating, using, and reporting criterion-referenced tests. It provides a comprehensive presentation of criterion-referenced testing technology. The package emphasizes the most recent substantive and technological advances in the field that are both important…

TAILOR is a computer program that uses the implied orders concept as the basis for computerized adaptive testing. The basic characteristics of TAILOR, which does not involve pretesting, are reviewed here and two studies of it are reported. One is a Monte Carlo simulation based on the four-parameter Birnbaum model and the other uses a matrix of…

Technical improvements, which may be made in the reliability and validity of tests through confidence scores, are discussed. However, studies indicate that subjects do not handle their confidence uniformly. (MS)

This monograph documents the basis for selection of test items and health-related, criterion-referenced standards associated with the Brockport Physical Fitness Test (BPFT), a criterion-referenced fitness test for children and adolescents with disabilities. The manual is divided into separate chapters for the relevant components or sub-components…

As a measure of musical aptitude, a new 90-item Pitch Discrimination Test was developed, and its internal structure was examined. Each of the three sections of the test measures an individual's aptitude for pitch discrimination in a different frequency range using square-wave tones generated by a personal computer. A total of 1,303 examinees,…

The process of revising and validating two English language tests used by the United States armed forces in hiring foreign nationals overseas is described. Development of the item banks and classification of items are outlined, and field testing in the United States and overseas is described. The tests were the basic and intermediate level…