After discussing the demand for public accountability in Australian education, the first section of this paper treats the scope of accountability and details the responsibilities of a state minister of education, other key administrators, schools and teachers, and the national system itself. The second section examines what the public wants to…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether item difficulty is significantly affected by language difficulty and response set convergence. Language difficulty was varied by increasing sentence (stem) length, increasing syntactic complexity, and substituting uncommon words for more familiar terms in the item stem. Item wording ranged from…

Three papers are included in this document. The first, "An Introduction to the Problem of Test User Qualifications," by Kevin L. Moreland, is a short history of the American Psychological Association (APA)/American Educational Research Association (AERA)/National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) Working Group on Test User…

The current technology of computerized testing is discussed, and a few comments are made on how such technology might be used for assessing school-related skills as part of the National Assessment of Educational progress (NAEP). The critical feature of computerized assessment procedures is that the test items are presented in interactive fashion,…

The instructional components of mediation, a teaching technique used in dynamic assessment, were evaluated with 100 four-year-old children attending daycare or preschools in London, Ontario. The effects of familiarization with task materials, task-specific rule teaching, and elaborated feedback were assessed using a pretest-posttest design.…

Some of the issues, history, and approaches in the testing of second language writing skills are reviewed. It is argued that because writing serves many important functions in the lives of individuals and activities that speech cannot do equally well, it is time to stop viewing writing as secondary to speech and to accord it equal attention. Most…

One hundred and five English undergraduate college students at two colleges in England completed the Holland Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI), the Barron Ego Strength Scale, the Adult Nowicki-Strickland Internal-External Control Scale, and the Occupational Values Q Sort. Congruent students were identified by matching their reading (major)…

Five papers address factors in the education of children with cultural or linguistic differences. N. Dew documents the prevalence of exceptional bilingual children, analyzes trends, and recommends future data collection and monitoring efforts in "The Exceptional Bilingual Child: Demography." E. Vasquez Nutall et al present "A Critical Look at…

A study was undertaken in an effort to develop techniques for monolingual speech pathologists in the Boston public schools to assess whether language behavior of Cape Verdean immigrants is due to language learning disabilities or simply to language differences. The following three questions were addressed: (1) What are some of the differences…

This report is the first in a series of publications emanating from a four year research effort designed to further knowledge of admissions testing and handicapped people. The report is divided into three major sections describing (1) the development of the research program, (2) a context for conducting that research, and (3) major research issues…

The effects of a multidimensional latent trait space on estimation of item and person parameters by the computer program LOGIST are examined. Several item pools were simulated that ranged from truly unidimensional to an inconsequential general latent trait. Item pools with intermediate levels of prepotency of the general latent trait were also…

Several techniques have been developed for creating continuous smooth distributions of test norms. This paper describes two studies that explore the behavior of cubic splines in order to determine their appropriateness for use in test norming. The first study uses data from the Curriculum Referenced Tests of Mastery (CRTM) and employs two…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss ways in which developmental psychology suffers from the lack of an appropriate technology of measurement and statistical analysis. The paper begins by noting that developmental psychology is the study of change; that individuals develop through a succession of "stages" which are separated by…

In circumstances where judges are required to make ratings of performance, it is usually required to have two or more raters who are trained to agree on independent ratings of the same performance. It is suggested that such a requirement may produce the paradox of attenuation associated with item analysis, in which too high a correlation between…

The Title I Evaluation and Reporting System (TIERS) was developed in order to examine the extent to which Title I (now Chapter 1) is remediating the disadvantages in basic skills of educationally deprived children. TIERS Model A contrasts the achievement of Chapter 1 students to publishers' norms for hypothetically comparable groups of students.…