International large-scale assessments provide cross-national data on students' cognitive and non-cognitive characteristics. A critical methodological issue that often arises in comparing data from cross-national studies is ensuring measurement invariance, indicating that the construct under investigation is the same across the compared groups.…

The OECD and its U.S. administrator, McGraw-Hill Education CTB, have recently concluded the first cycle of the OECD-Test for Schools in the U.S. This test is being marketed to local schools and is designed to compare 15-year-olds from individual participating schools against peers nationally and internationally using the OECD's PISA test as its…

The tests we use to evaluate student achievement may well be sound measures of what students know, but they are faulty indicators at best of how well they have been taught. A remedy to this this situation of judging teachers by the performance of their students on high-stakes tests may be in hand already. We should look to the methods successfully…

This chapter introduces theory that undergirds the role of testing adaptations in assessment, provides examples of item modifications and testing accommodations, reviews research relevant to each, and introduces a new paradigm that incorporates opportunity to learn (OTL), academic enablers, testing adaptations, and inferences that can be made from…

Recently, educational researchers and practitioners have turned to value-added models to evaluate teacher performance. Although value-added estimates depend on the assessment used to measure student achievement, the importance of outcome selection has received scant attention in the literature. Using data from a large, urban school district, I…

In some situations where reliability must be estimated it is impossible to divide the measuring instrument into more than two separately scoreable parts. In such a case, neither Cronbach's coefficient alpha nor Kristof's three-part approach are satisfactory. A technique is developed for estimating reliability in such situations. (Author/BJG)

A good test used to measure student's knowledge and abilities is useful educationally even if it does not teach directly. Article based on address at American Society for Engineering Education's North Midwest Section Effective Teaching Institute, March 1969. (IR)

In this speech given at the 1976 annual breakfast of the National Council on Measurement in Education Dr. Thomas J. Fitzgibbon, outgoing president of NCME, responds to critics of standardized testing and outlines the correct uses for it. He believes that many criticisms of standardized testing are due to misunderstanding or a lack of information.…

Reviews the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children, an individually administered test of intelligence and achievement. Finds it to be of high overall quality. (FL)

Hypotheses for the decline in the Scholastic Aptitude Test scores can be listed under four headings: changes in society, changes in the schools, changes in the testing population, and problems with the tests. However, it is concluded that SAT scores are still constant and reliable measures. (JY)

Certain testing procedures will overcome some of the problems associated with the use of essay tests. Essay tests may not validly indicate achievement because the questions included in the test may not fairly represent instructional content. Reliability may be a problem because of variations in examinee response in different situations, in test…

There exist special problems in testing first-grade children. Orally administered yes-no tests reduce the problems found in the other types, but they have their own drawbacks. A solution to some of these drawbacks is the use of the matched-pair scoring technique. For each "yes" item on the test there is included a "reversed" or…

Developing practical achievement tests for use at the primary-grade level is a difficult task. Some problems encountered appear to be resolved by using verbally administered yes-no tests. But such tests are criticized as having a low reliability because they offer only two choices. Two modifications of the yes-no test have been proposed to…

The paper discusses some problems in using achievement tests with hearing impaired students and offers some general suggestions for school testing programs. (PHR)

The Alpert-Haber Achievement Anxiety Test was developed to measure the extent to which individuals experience test anxiety. In at least two published studies, the authors claim to have used the test when in fact the response format was changed from that used in the original instrument and the "buffer" items were omitted. To investigate…