Although most language programs make placement decisions on the basis of placement tests, there is surprisingly little published about different contexts and systems of placement testing. The present volume contains case studies of placement programs in foreign language programs at the tertiary level across the United States. The different…

In this article we address the issue of consistency in standard setting in the context of an augmented state testing program. Information gained from the external NRT scores is used to help make an informed decision on the determination of cut scores on the state test. The consistency of cut scores on the CRT across grades is maintained by forcing…

Ten years have passed since President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind (NCLB), making it the educational law of the land. A review of a decade of evidence demonstrates that NCLB has failed badly both in terms of its own goals and more broadly. It has neither significantly increased academic performance nor significantly reduced…

Since the inception of mandated testing in reading and mathematics, social studies instruction has been marginalized in elementary and middle schools. After the genesis of several state-mandated testing programs and nearly a decade after the launch of the No Child Left Behind legislation, the effects of limited K-8 social studies instruction are…

Presents the preliminary results of a comparison of Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) and conventional testing of English competency for students with limited English proficiency. The CAT procedure, which uses computers and a measurement theory known as Item Response Theory (IRT), provides several benefits that traditional paper and pencil…

This is the second report on the school achievement of children 6-11 years old in the noninstitutionalized population of the United States as estimated from the Reading and Arithmetic subtest data of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT) obtained in the Health Examination Survey of 1963-65. It contains findings by selected demographic and…

The purpose of this study was to explore how high school social studies teachers made sense of curriculum work. The setting was a large, urban area in Texas with high percentages of students who were considered economically disadvantaged. The context of the study was important because these teachers were implementing revised standards and new…

The information and assessment materials in these resources have been designed to assist teachers to gauge their own students' proficiency in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) literacy. By examining modules from the National Year 6 and Year 10 ICT Literacy Assessment teachers may be able to design similar tasks and to judge their…

This study demonstrates how administrative variables can alter the utility of a current MMPI test. Individual administration was significantly superior to group administration and special" administration was significantly superior to routine administration. (Author/CG)

This paper examines factors that influence the post-adoption satisfaction of educators with e-learning systems. Based on the expectation-confirmation framework, we propose a research model that demonstrates how post-adoption beliefs affect post-adoption satisfaction. The model was tested at a university by educators (n = 175) who use an e-learning…

Models of Response to Intervention (RTI) include parameters of assessment and instruction. This study focuses on assessment with the purpose of developing a screening battery that validly and efficiently identifies first-grade children at risk for reading problems. In an RTI model, these children would be candidates for early intervention. We…

Licensure testing programs in the United States (e.g., nursing) face an increasing challenge of measuring the competency of internationally trained candidates, both in relation to their clinical competence and their English language competence. To assist with the latter, professional licensing bodies often adopt well-established and widely…

Many challenges exist for high-stakes testing programs offering continuous computerized administration. The automated assembly of test questions to exactly meet content and other requirements, provide uniformity, and control item exposure can be modeled and solved by mixed-integer programming (MIP) methods. A case study of the computerized…

This study uses a new psychometric model (mixture item response theory-MIMIC model) that simultaneously estimates differential item functioning (DIF) across manifest groups and latent classes. Current DIF detection methods investigate DIF from only one side, either across manifest groups (e.g., gender, ethnicity, etc.), or across latent classes…

This study examined the extent to which log-linear smoothing could improve the accuracy of differential item functioning (DIF) estimates in small samples of examinees. Examinee responses from a certification test were analyzed using White examinees in the reference group and African American examinees in the focal group. Using a simulation…