Long-running surveys need a systematic way to reflect social change and to keep items relevant to respondents, especially when they ask about controversial subjects, or they threaten the items' validity. We propose a protocol for updating measures that preserves content and construct validity. First, substantive experts articulate the current and…

Construct validity and building validity arguments are some of the main challenges facing the language assessment community. The notion of construct validity and validity arguments arose from research in psychological assessment and developed into the gold standard of validation/validity research in language assessment. At a theoretical level,…

The purpose of this study was to determine which of three competing models will provide, reliable, interpretable, and responsive measures of elementary students' understanding of the nature of science (NOS). The Nature of Science Instrument-Elementary (NOSI-E), a 28-item Rasch-based instrument, was used to assess students' NOS…

Possible threats to the validity of North Carolina's accountability model used to predict academic growth were investigated in two ways: the state's regression equations were replicated but updated to utilize current testing data and not that from years past as in the state's current model; and the updated equations were expanded to include…

A longitudinal design was used to test the hypotheses that career development indices account for significant amounts of variance in the prediction of high school success, and account for unique variance beyond that of academic predictors of high school success. The participants included 188 11th-grade students who were followed-up in the 12th…

This study evaluates the validity of two aggression scales for predicting observations of malicious or disruptive behavior at school. Subgroups of a sample of 1,560 children (age 8.6 plus or minus 1.5 years) were assessed using (a) peer nominations of aggression, (b) teacher reports on the Teacher Report Form (TRF) of the Child Behavior Checklist…