This study examines the validity and usefulness of employing standardized placement tests and other indicators of academic ability to make education or training decisions about community college students. It also demonstrates how attempts to make optimal educational placement decisions through mandatory placement testing are confounded by…

Validity data were collected on tests from five aptitude clusters: information-processing (IP) componential skills, IP metacomponential skills, practical intellectual skills, cognitive flexibility, and cognitive speed. In addition, the IP activities underlying learning were elucidated. IP componential data were derived via two approaches. The…

This report cumulates the results of 515 validation studies carried out over a 45-year period by the United States Employment Service, and relates these findings to five systems of job classification and job analysis. Correction for sampling error shows that general cognitive, perceptual, and psychomotor ability are valid predictors of job…

This study examined efficacy of different story collection procedures with normally developing (N=10) and language disordered (N=6) preschool children. Factor analyses probed such possible interfering factors as home vs. school environments, familiarity of the story requester, coaxing cues, stimulus structure, and presence of such props as dolls…

Based on material prepared for the California Assessment Program, an argument in favor of authentic assessment is presented, and authentic assessment is contrasted with traditional standardized tests. An assessment is authentic when student performance on intellectual tasks is directly examined. Comparatively, traditional assessment relies on…

The Flesch readability index yields meaningful information about the responses of readers to texts. Because the formula is so simple, a group of English teachers wrote a program in BASIC that would count some obvious surface features of a text and calculate Flesch scores. Among the programing problems encountered were counting words (taking into…

This paper summarizes the Alabama Career Incentive Program, a statewide effort to evaluate more than 30,000 teachers including specialists in guidance, speech therapy, and so on. The evaluation was based on 10 classroom competencies and five outside-the-class professional competencies. A low-inference instrument measured competencies by using…

The Inductive Reasoning and Analytical Reasoning tests of the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation have been analyzed in a factorial study including marker tests for two commonly recognized reasoning factors, induction (three tests) and logical reasoning (two tests). The primary purpose of the study was to determine the extent to which the Johnson…

The implementation of any competency testing program must take into consideration the due process clause and the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Examples of the violation of the due process clause would be to implement a testing program without adequate notice or to cover material not taught. Instructional validity must be…

Practical and technical aspects of language testing research are considered in 23 articles. Topical areas include: testing of general proficiency; the hypothesis of a single unitary factor accounting for reliable variance in tests; the structure of language proficiency; pros and cons of cloze testing; a new functional testing approach; and…

The research literature on oral achievement testing is reviewed, and advantages and disadvantages of oral tests are described. A number of suggestions are made for improving the objectivity, reliability, and validity of oral tests. The results of a survey of the attitudes and experiences of a selected sample of college students with regard to…

Two studies are presented in this report. The first is titled "Empirical Studies of Multilevel Approaches to Test Development and Interpretation: Measuring Between-Group Differences in Instruction." Because of a belief that schooling does affect student achievement, researchers have questioned the empirical and measurement techniques…

The purpose of this study was to examine the stability of measures of student writing performance across types of discourse (genres) and across response modes (selected response: multiple choice; constructed response: single paragraph, and full length essay). The study addressed the following: (1) the relationship/stability of writing scores…

To examine the influence of test wiseness and motivation on Title I students' performance in group standardized tests, the effects of training students and teachers in testing skills and reinforcing student testing behavior were investigated during the administration of the Stanford Achievement Test, Level II, to 597 students. Students were…

The cognitive determinants of number series completion performance were studied by presenting a systematic set of problems to adults and to children of high and average intelligence, grades 4 and 5. Pearson correlations between these problems and the number series on the Cognitive Abilities Test were .51, .78 and .43 for the average intelligence,…