Individually Prescribed Instruction (IPI) has been criticized as inhibiting the development of creativity. It is proposed that a pilot study be conducted whose goal will be the selection and trial of instruments for measuring creative problem-solving ability in order to compare IPI pupils with non-IPI pupils, and to differentiate among individuals…

Instead of shying away from problem solving items, testing specialists should devise and offer guidelines for construction and scoring problem solving items. (Editor/LBH)

Performance assessments can provide an effective means of measuring abilities that are difficult or impossible to measure with a multiple-choice test, such as ability to communicate, solve problems, and employ critical thinking skills. Performance assessments consist of a task and a set of scoring guidelines, or a rubric. Both performance tasks…

This paper reports the results of the second of a series of collaborative studies examining how children acquire the skills to represent and solve verbal addition and subtraction problems. The purpose of this study was to identify the cognitive processing capabilities of a group of Tasmanian (Australian) children. Fifteen cognitive tests were…

Information necessary for informed use by practitioners of higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) tests is presented. Assessment instruments that (1) have as a basic assumption that thinking skills can be taught; (2) provide information that can be useful for instructional planning related to complex thought processes; and (3) have content that is…

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…

The purpose of this study was to identify the working memory capacity (M-space) for a group of 139 children (4 to 8 years of age) enrolled at Sandy Bay Infant School in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Four M-space tests -- The Counting Span Test (Case and Kurland, 1978), Mr. Cucui Test (DeAvila and Havassy, 1974), the Digit Placement Test (Case,…

Two experiments to develop psychometric and administrative data on instruments designated for a testing program with disadvantaged elementary school children were undertaken. These instruments provide measures of growth and development in such diverse areas as verbal expressiveness (the ITPA and the Hertzig/Birch scoring of the PSI), problem…

Summarizes a study of instruments developed for use in assessing aspects of science curriculum and instruction. (PB)

This paper reports on an experiment designed to investigate the effect of structural and linguistic variables on level of difficulty in solving arithmetic word problems. Identification of such variables is intended to assist curriculum writers in preparing exercises at a specified level of difficulty for students at various age levels. The study…

Criteria for placement tests on math skills of adult basic education (ABE) students are needed to develop tests that are not too "school-like" because the ABE students are often blocked by math anxiety due to past negative school experiences, students may encounter language problems that affect their math skills, simple math problems do…