Two-stage and multistage test designs provide a way of roughly adapting item difficulty to test-taker ability. All test takers take a parallel stage-one test, and, based on their scores, they are routed to tests of different difficulty levels in subsequent stages. These designs provide some of the benefits of standard computerized adaptive testing…

Errors in item parameter estimates have a negative impact on the accuracy of item and test information functions. The estimation errors may be random, but because items with higher levels of discriminating power are more likely to be selected for a test, and these items are most apt to contain positive errors, the result is that item information…

Findings of an audit of the New York State Education Department's procedures to maintain security over Pupil Evaluation Program (PEP) and Program Evaluation Test (PET) examination materials are presented in this report. The audit sought to determine whether the department's security procedures adequately prevented unauthorized access to exam…

As the new version of the "Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing" is being developed, it is apparent that putting together a set of standards for test publishing involves many difficulties. Although the basic intent of almost all parties involved is similar, there are many potential areas of disagreement among parties to…

In this study, fourth-grade special education students (n=78) and general education students (n=403) took a large-scale statewide test using standard test administration procedure and two major accommodations addressing response conditions and test administration. On both reading and math tests, students bubbled in answers on a separate sheet (the…

The question of reliability in the intellectual assessment of young children is cause for concern among developmental psychologists and diagnosticians. The issue of reliability is confounded by normal variability in skills during early childhood, by the problem of consistency across time of age-appropriate assessment measures, and by the selection…

Many testing programs include a section of optional questions in addition to mandatory parts of a test. These optional parts of a test are not often truly parallel to one another, and groups of examinees selecting each optional test section are not equivalent to one another. This paper provides a general method based on missing-data methods for…

Supplemental or peripheral responses by test takers are seldom used by examiners, but in this study a program introduced by Thomas Edison State College (New Jersey) to allow the examined student to provide feedback to the testers and graders was studied. Student comment forms were designed to enable the student to identify problems with the test…

"America 2000," President Bush's national strategy for "Reinventing America's Schools" is evaluated by 30 invited experts in the following papers: "Bottom-up Reform From the Top Down" (John E. Chubb); "Would Choice + Competition Yield Quality Education?" (Richard F. Elmore); "The Federal Education Role…

The use of computers to build diagnostic inferences is explored in two contexts. In computerized monitoring of liquid oxygen systems for the space shuttle, diagnoses are exact because they can be derived within a world which is closed. In computerized classroom testing of reading comprehension, programs deliver a constrained form of adaptive…

The present research investigated the claim that certain intellectual characteristics predict attitudes toward multiple-choice tests, particularly the claim that creative persons hold negative attitudes toward these tests. The study examined the relationships between attitudes toward multiple-choice tests and convergent production, divergent…

This document presents a series of five papers describing issues in educational measurement. "A Simple Model for Diagnostic Testing When There Are Several Types of Misinformation" directly addresses the diagnostic issue. It describes a simple latent trait model for testing, examines use of erroneous algorithms, and illustrates the…

Three studies, carried out independently at Ben Gurion University and at Haifa University, tested students of comparable English proficiency who were enrolled in similar courses of English reading comprehension. The studies were carried out to investigate the effect of dictionary use in examinations on students' test performance. In the study at…

The purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss some of the problems presented by the use of computerized adaptive testing (CAT) in an instructional programs environment versus large scale testing applications, and to describe an actual implementation of CAT in an instructional programs setting. This particular application is in the…

The relationship between students' scores on a verbal meaning test and their degrees of confidence in item responses was investigated. Subjects were black undergraduate students and they were administered a verbal meaning test by following a confidence testing procedure. (Author/BJG)