Examines whether a defect of the C-test can be avoided by constructing a C-test with five texts and 126 items. The test was tried with 146 Iranian English majors. On the basis of item analysis, a tailored C-test with 100 items was developed and tried with 60 other subjects. Results show no gains were made with the classical item analysis.…

Investigates two problems: (1) do learning effects accrue in accuracy or response time when computerized tests are administered in two sessions? and (2) what are the effects of tonal pattern order and contour types on average item difficulty and length of response time for children with different levels of achievement? (DSK)

Sixth-grade teachers (n=26) estimated item performance for their students (724 total students) on a 50-item district-wide science test. Teachers were more accurate in estimating performance of the total group than of the borderline group, but in neither case was their accuracy high. Estimating proportion-correct values using the Angoff standard…

Referral, placement, and retention decisions were analyzed using item response theory (IRT) to study whether classification decisions could be placed on the latent continuum of ability normally associated with test items and to study the existence of classification differential item functioning. Results with 352 kindergarten children demonstrate…

Reports on the data gleaned from the survey on dance education administered simultaneously with the 1997 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) arts assessments. Presents the process and problems of developing and implementing assessments in dance. Considers the value of the assessments to dance and offers recommendations for the…

Applying 2 different models of test construction to test results for a pool of more than 190,000 high school students found no systematic bias against groups with smaller or no representation in the test standardization sample. These results support the integrity of widely used sampling and item selection procedures. (SLD)

Examined the incidence of differential item functioning (DIF) on 3 subtests of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills using test scores for 2,867 Alaskan students, characterized as "Native" or White at fourth and sixth grades or sixth and eighth grades. Effect size differences favoring whites were larger when students of equal English…

Describes the development of the performance assessment tasks of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study. The challenge was to produce tasks that would measure the achievement of curricular objectives while being sufficiently reliable to allow comparisons between countries and of groups within countries. (SLD)

Evaluated a computer-delivered response type for measuring quantitative skill, the "Generating Examples" (GE) response type, which presents under-determined problems that can have many right answers. Results from 257 graduate students and applicants indicate that GE scores are reasonably reliable, but only moderately related to Graduate…

We make five over-time comparisons of student knowledge of civics and government: a) knowledge among 4th, 8th, and 11/12th graders between 1975/6 and 1998 using two separate NAEP trend assessments; b) knowledge over the same period by comparing responses to individual items asked in the 1975/6 and 1981/2 assessments to responses on identical…

The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of four item selection rules--(1) Fisher information (F), (2) Fisher information with a posterior distribution (FP), (3) Kullback-Leibler information with a posterior distribution (KP), and (4) completely randomized item selection (RN)--with respect to the precision of trait estimation and the…

Ability estimates yielded by the one- (1PL), two- (2PL), and three-parameter (3PL) models and the nominal response model (NRM) were compared with the number-right (NR) scoring model using items not susceptible to test-wiseness (NTW) and items susceptible to the ID1 test-wiseness strategy. These items were contained in grade 12 diploma examinations…

The problem of dimensionality with respect to Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) specifically and, more generally, "g" or fluid intelligence, has been a long-standing issue. The present article reports two studies examining the dimensionality of both the original Set II of the APM (n = 506) and a short form (n = 644), using principal…

This research examined the degree of comparability and sources of incomparability of English and French versions of reading, mathematics, and science tests that were administered as part of a survey of achievement in Canada. The results point to substantial psychometric differences between the 2 language versions. Approximately 18% to 36% of the…

A popular design in large-scale educational assessments as well as any other type of survey is the balanced incomplete block design. The design is based on an item pool split into a set of blocks of items that are assigned to sets of "assessment booklets." This article shows how the problem of calculating an optimal balanced incomplete block…