Describes Florida's efforts at instituting statewide item banking and testing program in vocational education. Discusses rationale for statewide testing program and item banking procedure as well as development and coding of items, dissemination of item bank to school districts, and development of statewide test. Outlines problems encountered,…

The consequences of using item response theory (IRT) item bias detecting procedures with multidimensional IRT item data are examined. Limitations in procedures for detecting item bias are discussed. (SLD)

Describes the development of a scale to measure environmental attitudes of grade school children. The scale items reflect children's knowledge of environmental issues, and the scale uses an age-appropriate format. The scale's 25 items were selected through item analysis from a larger pool of items. Discusses potential use for research and…

A graphical-decision rule for studying an item's behavior and admitting items onto a test form is proposed. The tool--the isthmus of acceptance--ameliorates some parameter stability problems common to binary item response theory models by using a functional representation of item performance, and it is tuned to match current standards. (TJH)

Evaluates the equivalence of translated achievement tests administered to 4,400 English- and French-speaking sixth-graders. Items displaying differential item functioning were flagged using three statistical methods; results were relatively consistent across methods, but not identical. Substantive review of French items via back-translation to…

The present study investigated the factor structure and item analysis of the Mini Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire (MiniAQLQ) in a sample of 258 community-dwelling asthmatic adults between the ages of 16 and 87 years. The mean age was 56 years for males (N = 99) and 50 years for females (N = 159). This study compared the fit of three factor…

A number of recent articles have claimed strong relationships--i.e., very high "proportions of shared variance"--between pairs of teaching and learning questionnaires. These claims have been the subject of debate and it has emerged that the proportion of shared variance is defined as the complement of Wilks' lambda. The present article argues that…

The authors examined police officers' knowledge of memory changes in adulthood utilizing the Knowledge of Memory Aging Questionnaire (KMAQ). The KMAQ is a 28-item true/false questionnaire that covers a broad range of topics related to normal memory aging due to maturational processes and pathological memory aging, such as adult dementia. Results…

The aim of this work was to determine, in terms of Type I and Type II error rates, the risks of applying various statistical procedures for evaluating differential item functioning. To this end, the authors carried out a simulation study in which the Mantel-Haenszel and SIBTEST procedures were applied in conjunction. The variables manipulated were…

This article describes the development of assessment criteria for specific aspects of examination answers and coursework essays in psychology. The criteria specified the standards expected for seven aspects of students' work: addressing the question, covering the area, understanding the material, evaluating the material, developing arguments,…

This study explored evidence of the construct validity of the interest scales on the Campbell Interest and Skill Survey (CISS; Campbell, Hyne, & Nilsen, 1992) by testing evidence for convergent validity with the Strong Interest Inventory (SII; Hansen & Campbell, 1985). Two hypotheses were formulated. First, matching CISS and SII scales…

Interactions among the imagination, expertise reversal, and element interactivity effects were investigated in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, less knowledgeable primary school students learning to use a bus timetable produced better performance under study than imagination conditions, but an increase in their experience reversed the result,…

Conceptual overlap and heterogeneity have long been noted as weaknesses of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory's clinical scales. Restructured clinical (RC) scales recently were developed to address these concerns (A. Tellegen et al., 2003). The authors evaluated the psychometric properties of the RC scales in psychology clinic clients…

The enumeration of small numbers of objects (approximately 4) proceeds rapidly, accurately, and with little effort via a process termed subitization. Four experiments examined whether it was possible to subitize the number of features rather than objects present in a display. Overall, the findings showed that when features are presented randomly…

Multidimensional adaptive testing (MAT) procedures are proposed for the measurement of several latent traits by a single examination. Bayesian latent trait estimation and adaptive item selection are derived. Simulations were conducted to compare the measurement efficiency of MAT with those of unidimensional adaptive testing and random…