Clinical competence is a multidimensional concept and encompasses a variety of skills including procedural, problem-solving and clinical judgement. The initial stages of postgraduate medical training are believed to be a particularly important time for the development of clinical skill competencies. This study reports on an evaluation of a…

Instructional validity of the Florida graduation test and the degree to which students were given proper preparation to pass it were studied. The Florida model illustrates procedures are available to demonstrate to the court that required skills are being taught to prepare students for success on competency tests. (DWH)

Discusses two reasons why the state of writing performance may worsen when, beginning in 1983, Tennessee high school students must pass a proficiency test as a condition for graduation; reasons are the objective nature of the test and the language performance objectives which the test proposes to measure. (NEC)

The process of setting performance standards must be examined within the particular context in which specific approaches have been used to construct or select the criterion performance measures being utilized. (Author/RLV)

To determine to what extent competencies to be measured by the Alabama High School Graduation Examination were being taught in the Alabama public schools, a survey was conducted of teachers of grades 7, 8, 9, and 10. Competencies that were not being taught are identified and possible explanations are outlined. (Author/EGS)

Content, instructional, and curricular validity, as related to certification tests, are examined. All three deal with content validity but the domain differs among the the three. Certification tests must have instructional validity, i.e., the test must be valid both with respect to the domain used to define the minimum competencies and the…

Guidelines are presented for use by school personnel in reviewing and improving locally developed proficiency tests used in meeting the requirements of the California Pupil Proficiency Law. The guide is organized in three main chapters on test construction, test validation, and test documentation. The test construction chapter focuses on issues…

The introduction of training packages has focused attention on the quality of assessment in the Australian vocational education and training (VET) sector on the quality of assessment. For the process of mutual recognition under the Australian Recognition Framework (ARF) to work effectively, there needs to be confidence in assessment decisions made…

Three areas of concern for those considering competency-based graduation requirements are discussed. First, what is involved in implementing a competency-based graduation requirement? The first tasks are the specification of performance standards and the performance skill areas. Then, appropriate certification procedures can be selected, and their…