The soundness of the existing system of examination at the high school level in India is assessed with particular reference to the English section. The purposes to be served by the examination are discussed and the shortcomings of the system are described. The test and the passing procedure is found inferior to those systems which utilize…

Undergraduates responded to an objective test in electronics and classified each item by domain (one of 14 topics covered in their text), and by type of knowledge (definition, fact, principle, or interpretation). These judgments were compared to their instructor's "standard" judgments. From these data, an index of item-domain divergence…

The development of the Test of Logical Thinking (TOLT), a group test of formal reasoning ability that requires students to solve problems and to justify the solutions obtained, is presented. Procedures are described for investigations of internal consistency, construct validity, and criterion-related validity. Items used in prior research serve as…

This paper evaluates two measurement instruments with regard to their ability to measure children's and young people's attitudes toward animals. The instruments are the Fireman Test (in which children are asked to identify those few animals and/or material possessions which a fireman should try to save during a fire) and the Good Ideas and Bad…

Forty three-option multiple choice (MC) statements on a midterm examination were converted to 120 true-false (TF) statements, identical in content. Test forms (MC and TF) were randomly administered to 50 undergraduates, to investigate the validity and internal consistency reliability of the two forms. A Kuder-Richardson formula 20 reliability was…

Standards for evaluating criterion-referenced tests are presented. Twenty-one standards, grouped in three categories, are discussed. Category one is defined as measurement properties and is comprised of conceptual validity, including description of the domain, test item agreement with objectives, and item representativeness of the objectives; and…

This final report presents a description of a test combining cloze procedure and an entropy analysis (CLOZENTROPY), designed to measure the compatibility of a foreign student's English with that of his peers who are native speakers of English. This test, and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) were administered to 48 foreign students…

Performance testing often entails the usage of expensive, time-consuming measures in the quest for determining the level of performance on some desired behavior. It is concluded that a generalizability theory approach to dealing with departures from reality in testing can aid in the establishment of empirically-based choices of measurement…

During the past few years the problem of bias in testing has become an increasingly important issue. In most research, bias refers to the fair use of tests and has thus been defined in terms of an outside criterion measure of the performance being predicted by the test. Recently however, there has been growing interest in assessing bias when such…

This paper is part 3 of Research Department Report Number 123, "Exploring the T.R.Q.: An Assessment of the Effectiveness of the Teachers' Rating Questionnaire," which gave questionnaire users information necessary to tailor the instrument to their own needs. Retention of TRQ questions which generated good distributions of teacher ratings…

This report assesses the validity, reliability, and efficiency of the Teachers' Rating Questionnaire (TRQ), a pupils' school success measure developed in connection with a 1961 longitudinal Study of Achievement. TRQ ratings on nearly 14,000 pupils, gathered in the Study of Achievement and a New Canadian Report, constituted the data source.…

The following problems in the field of essay grading have persisted: (1) low reliability of grading, (2) deciding upon elements or variables to consider, and (3) deciding on the weight to assign to each variable. Described are two aspects of a study on essay grading at the high school level in Alberta, Canada: (1) the reliability of scoring…

The purposes of this study were to investigate (1) the consistency among fifth-grade children in conceptual style across different conceptual style instruments and (2) the generalizability of conceptual style behavior to school related tasks when stability and instability of children's conceptual style were taken into consideration. Children…

Although the "Don't Know" (DK) option has received telling criticism in maximum performance summative tests, its potential use in formative evaluation was considered and judged to be more promising. The pretest of an instructional module was administered with DK options. Examinees were then required to answer each question to which they had…

This report reviews the employment testing of minorities and discusses the limitations of the test results. Statistical validation of test results is stressed as a means to avoid cultural bias and avoid discriminatory screening tests. Noting that fair hiring practices and valid tests may not be enough to provide equal employment opportunities for…