To assess students' business writing abilities upon entry into the business program and exit from the capstone course, a multitiered assessment package was developed that measures students' achievement of specific learning outcomes and provides "value-added" scores. The online segment of the test measures five competencies across three process…

This digest discusses how well authentic mathematics assessment tests can be expected to meet the needs of mathematics instruction that focuses on conceptual insights and analytical skills. In the new mathematics curriculum, situational lessons or real-life problems attempt to include dimensions of thinking and reasoning, individual or small-group…

This paper describes a study that investigated the interchangeability of four different assessment methods for measuring middle-school students' understanding of science concepts. The four methods compared were hands-on tasks with associated multiple-choice and written justification items, written analogues of the hands-on tasks, and two types of…

This study investigated and compared the effects of two test formats (free response and multiple choice) on English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners' reading comprehension. The tests, together with a checklist of test-taking strategies and retrospective questionnaires concerning more general reading strategies, were administered to 57 ESL…

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the effects of replacing multiple-choice questions in tutorial software practice interactions with a learning strategy (i.e., learner-generated summaries) on immediate recall. Subjects were 35 students--32 females and 3 males--from an undergraduate computer course in the College of Education at…

The California Assessment Program (CAP) administers tests to all public school students at certain grade levels, compiles the results, and provides information that allows educators to judge the effectiveness of their programs and make improvements. This sampler describes the types of assessment that CAP proposes to respond to the needed changes…

Using matched pairs of geography questions, a new testing method for machine-scored fill-in-the-blank, multiple-digit testing (MDT) questions was compared to the traditional multiple-choice (MC) style. Data were from 118 matched or parallel test items for 4 tests from 764 college students of geography. The new method produced superior results when…

A review of the recent literature has yielded a number of concerns about the validity, reliability, cost, efficiency, generalizability, utility, and cultural sensitivity of performance based assessments. The resulting conclusion was that continuing the performance based assessment initiative should be rethought. Suggested alternatives included…

Scholastic achievement tests and mental ability tests normally consist of a set of multiple choice items, all of which are assumed to measure school-relevant cognitive abilities. The presumption, in a given test situation, is that the answers/solutions to the given tasks represent cognitive capabilities on the part of the examinees. The purpose of…

Issues of the relative costs of multiple choice tests and alternative types of assessment are explored. Before alternative assessments in large-scale or small-scale programs are used, attention must be given to cost considerations and the resources required to develop and implement the assessment. Major categories of cost to be considered are…

Some potential relative advantages of performance assessment strategies over paper-and-pencil tests using short-answer and multiple-choice item formats are discussed. The major advantage of the multiple-choice test is its ability to sample a large number of learning outcomes efficiently. However, performance assessments are increasingly being used…

To explore the suggestion that subjects modulate their reading strategies in accordance with how they expect to be tested, several test expectancies (multiple-choice, true/false, essay, and cloze) were implemented in addition to a non-specific test expectancy as a control. Subjects were 124 students at Purdue University (Indiana). After reading…

A study, conducted in a basic educational psychology course which serves as a gateway course to a teacher education program at Michigan State University, focused on the development of new knowledge while it taught about the educational research process and the subject being studied. A new format for objective testing, alternate-choice questions,…

The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of state standards and their associated tests in public schools in order to hold schools, teachers, and students accountable for learning outcomes and achievement. In this qualitative study of eight world history and world geography teachers, the degree to which the Virginia Standards of Learning…

Some previous research results imply that women tend to perform better, relative to men, on constructed-response (CR) tests than on multiple-choice (MC) tests in the same subjects. An analysis of data from several tests used in the licensing of beginning teachers supported this hypothesis, to varying degrees, in most of the tests investigated. The…