In this keynote address, the author shares his reflections on politics, economics, and testing. He focuses on assessment and accountability and begins with some data from large scale written educational testing, "circa 1840". The author argues that people's penchant for accountability and their appetite for standardized testing are, in…

Discusses ways testing can help students learn if the teacher can remove the aura and function of evaluation from the experience. (GB)

Summarizes the views of two teachers who hold widely divergent views on what can be called classical examination methods - essay papers and objective exams. One of these authors is an Englishman, the other an American, but their views, while obviously conditioned by training, are shared or questioned by many colleagues regardless of national…

Responds to the Nader report on the Educational Testing Service authored by Nairn. Major themes of the nine chapters of the report are addressed. The last sections provide comment on the responses of the Educational Testing Service. (RC)

Discusses the role of examinations in teaching biology. Comments on the aims of examinations, essay questions, scientific writing, testing for comprehension of practical problems, problems and judgments, statistical skills, practical examinations, and the general problems of examining. (JR)

Discussed are 12 elementary level standardized science tests, their levels of questions, and problems relating to coordinating instruction and standardized tests. (SL)

Discussed are nine questions regarding standard setting issues in educational testing: (1) Should normative or content-referenced standards be used? (2) Different standard setting methods yield different results. Does this finding present a problem? (3) Assess the adequacy of the grounding of various methods of standard setting in psychological…

The Invitational Conference on Testing Problems has been a major convocation among the various annual meetings of those who are concerned with educational measurement. The first paper by Richard Anderson deals with the evaluation of a small part of an instructional program and deals with it in an experimental fashion. The presentation by Ethna…

An indictment of the ways in which reading and mathematics standardized tests affect classroom curricula. (Author)

This research discusses the dilemma of who should use educational and psychological tests. It is suggested that educational and social institutions moniter the use of testing in their areas. Public awareness of testing is increasing and critical. (MFD)

The focus of this conference was on aspects of change in education and testing. Two papers concern the special role of evaluation in new conceptions of instruction and learning. The first involves individually prescribed instruction in elementary school, and second, professional education. Both in the paper on computer-based instruction and in the…

This paper reports two experiments whose purpose was to relate two bodies of research on anxiety: test and trait-state anxiety. It was reasoned that state anxiety measures obtained in an evaluation testing condition should be more similar to test anxiety than state anxiety measures obtained in non-evaluative situations, such as a game in Study I…

A computer simulation procedure was developed to reproduce the overall pattern of results obtained in the Educational Testing Service Growth Study. Then simulated data for seven sets of 10,000 to 15,000 cases were analyzed, and findings compared on the basis of correlations between estimated and true growth scores. Findings showed that growth was…

Summarizes some of the findings of recent study of tests designed to determine the English language proficiency of nonnative speakers. (CFM)