The Advanced Placement Program reports grades to students and colleges on a 1 to 5 point scale derived from combining the separate scores on the multiple-choice and free-response sections of Advanced Placement Examinations (ADPEs). In this study, predictions of grades in first-semester college biology courses were made based on students' separate…

When test questions are not intended to measure language skills, it is important to know if language is an extraneous characteristic that affects item performance. This study investigates whether certain stylistic changes in the way items are presented affect item performance on examinations for a health profession. The subjects were medical…

The ability to correctly answer reading comprehension test items, without having read the accompanying reading passage, was compared for third grade learning disabled students and their peers from a regular classroom. In the first experiment, fourteen multiple choice items were selected from the Stanford Achievement Test. No reading passages were…

The effects of humorous test questions on test performance of high and low-anxious college students was investigated. It was hypothesized that humor should reduce the anxiety level of high-anxious subjects, and thus improve their performance, while having little effect on low-anxious subjects. Students were assigned to a low or high-anxious group…

This paper discusses the role of intelligence in language comprehension. In the study reported, an attempt is made to determine how much of the variability in English reading scores of non-native speakers of English can be predicted on the basis of intelligence alone. In the study, three measures of reading comprehension are used: a traditional…

The Connecticut Assessment of Educational Progress (CAEP) is a continuing program designed to measure the efficiency of educational programs offered by public schools. During 1979-80, grades 4, 8, 11 were tested in science. The assessment goals were: to provide information on the quality of education in Connecticut; to collect and compare data…

The technology of transforming sentences from prose instruction into test questions was examined by comparing two methods of selecting sentences (keyword vs. rare singleton), two types of question words (nouns vs. adjectives), and two foil construction methods (writer's choice vs. algorithmic). Four item writers created items using each…

Programmed materials are presented for teachers and administrators who want to become more familiar with the concept of career development in South Carolina. The package's two major goals are (1) to provide the learner with conceptual knowledge of career development and (2) to identify career development elements and objectives. Under the first…

The relative validity of adaptive and conventional testing strategies using non-test variables as one set of external criteria was investigated. A total of 101 college students completed both a variable length stradaptive test and peaked conventional test; a second group of 131 college students completed a variable length Bayesian adaptive test…

This study determined whether item forms ( rules for constructing items related to a domain or set of tasks) would enable naive item writers to generate multiple-choice items at three taxonomic levels--knowledge, comprehension, and application. Students wrote 120 multiple-choice items from 20 item forms, corresponding to educational objectives…

A questionnaire concerning attitudes toward the importance of communication skills and toward different modes of communication was administered to 290 incoming freshmen at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Students responded to one of two types of a 38-item questionnaire: a multiple choice, or Likert-type (strongly agree...strongly…

The Southern Illinois University School of Medicine applies mastery learning concepts to an objectives-based curriculum and uses the Nedelsky method to assess mastery of core objectives. Provisions are made for remediating deficiences. The Nedelsky technique is used for determining an acceptable level of performance in multiple choice examinations…

Twenty multiple-choice vocabulary items and 20 free-response vocabulary items were administered to 660 college students. The free-response items consisted of the stem words of the multiple-choice items. Testees were asked to respond to the free-response items with synonyms. A computer algorithm was developed to transform the numerous…

Two papers on teaching methods are presented. The first concerns an experiment that tested the relative effectiveness of three teaching methods: an uninterrupted lecture, a tape-recording, and reading a prescribed text. The three-way research design used the three teaching methods, three groups of six student teachers of physical medicine between…

This study developed and field tested instructional units designed to help young adult farmers use farm management principles in decision making. Relationships were also sought between farmers' personal characteristics and their posttest scores. Ten teachers of vocational agriculture (Group A) received inservice training in using the instructional…