Assessing students' emerging literacy skills is crucial for identifying areas where a child may be falling behind and can lead directly to an increased chance of reading success. The Waterford Assessment of Core Skills (WACS), a computerized adaptive test of early literacy for students in prekindergarten through 2nd grade, addresses this need.…

There is a need to identify children with potential mental health issues early in order to provide "an ounce of prevention." Unfortunately, there are few instruments available to identify emotional and behavioral issues in infants and many never receive intervention. We developed the Brief Child and Family Intake and Outcomes System for…

Data derived from universal screening procedures are increasingly utilized by schools to identify and provide additional support to students at risk for behavioral and emotional concerns. As screening has the potential to be resource intensive, effort has been placed on the development of efficient screening procedures, including brief behavior…

If children have opportunities to develop positive attitudes toward learning science, the pipeline to science careers can be maintained and enhanced. This article describes the development and validation of a short form, 24-item, Assessment of Attitudes in Science Constructs for Fourth Grade (AASC-4) for utilization in future research aimed at…

The aim of the study was to examine the importance of reliability and validity as necessary foundation for fair assessment. The concepts of reliability, validity, fair assessment and their relationships were analysed. Qualities of fair assessment were discussed. A number of recommendations were made to make assessors be more cautious in award of…

The article "Designing criterion-referenced assessment" (Burton, 2006) appeared in the "Journal of Learning Design," Volume 1, Issue 2 in 2006. Nine years later, Associate Professor Burton reflects upon her original article. when the article was written, the author worked at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). At…

A response is made to a paper that urges the use of the Rasch model for educational assessment. This paper argues that the model is inadequate and that claims for its efficacy are exaggerated and technically weak.

Purpose: This study assessed the reliability and validity of intermodality associations and differences in persons with aphasia (PWA) and healthy controls (HC) on a computerized listening and 3 reading versions of the Revised Token Test (RTT; McNeil & Prescott, 1978). Method: Thirty PWA and 30 HC completed the test versions, including a…

The purpose of this study was to develop an abbreviated version of the Perceived Motivational Climate in Exercise Questionnaire (PMCEQ-A) to provide a more practical instrument for use in applied exercise settings. In the calibration step, two shortened versions' measurement and latent model values were compared to each other and the original…

The importance of afterschool hours for youth development is widely acknowledged, and afterschool settings have recently received increasing attention as an important venue for youth interventions, bringing a growing need for reliable and valid measures of afterschool quality. This study examined the extent to which the two observational tools,…

Understanding human motivation requires gauging individuals' strivings to be effective in controlling goal pursuits and establishing the truth about themselves and their experiences. Two constructs, assessment and locomotion, capture well truth and control strivings, respectively. The validation process of the instruments measuring assessment and…

The purpose of this study was to develop a measurement instrument to determine pre-service teachers' perceptions of competency in biology teaching. A total of 835 pre-service teachers participated in this study. The data set obtained at the first stage was analyzed using exploratory factor analysis and the data set obtained at the second stage was…

School districts and states across the Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic Region and the country as a whole have been modifying their teacher evaluation systems to identify more effective and less effective teachers and provide better feedback to improve instructional practice. The new systems typically include components related to…

Teaching style has been a popular concept for many years. Teaching style refers to the distinct qualities displayed by a teacher that are persistent from situation to situation regardless of the content. The Principles of Adult Learning Scale (PALS) has been used extensively in the West for measuring teaching style in relationship to the adult…

The adaptive behavior construct has gained prominent attention in human services over the last several years in Portugal, and its measurement has become an integral part of the assessment of populations with intellectual disability. In Portugal, diagnosis remains exclusively based on IQ measures, although some attention recently has been given to…