The Second Year Communication Skills Program (SYCSP) consists of instructional materials and procedures designed to improve the reading skills of first-grade children. The reading achievement of students was measured in 10 classrooms using the SYCSP. The Second Year Program Test, used to judge the effectiveness of the program, was administered to…

The Progress Check Booklet is designed to be used by the student working in the programed course to determine if he has mastered the concepts in the course booklets on: electrical current; voltage; resistance; measuring current and voltage in series circuits; relationships of current, voltage, and resistance; parellel circuits; combination…

Gross Motor Observations is a test for preschool children which measures motor skills. Individual administration takes only two to three minutes and items are scored 0-3, low to high. The child is asked to perform a series of simple physical tasks which reveal the level of his motor ability. No skill is required for either administration or…

This instrument assesses readiness for school in preschool disadvantaged children. Two forms, A and B, are available and it is recommended that one be used as a diagnostic pretest and the other as a progress measure. The test is an individually administered, non-verbal, untimed, but paced instrument. The child responds to questions, given in…

Three third-grade, three sixth-grade, and three adult female examiners tested 108 kindergarten and third-grade girls, half of whom were familiar to them, on three individually administered measures. No differences in performance on any measure as a function of familiarity were found at either grade level. No differences by examiners of different…

The model for educational measurement developed by George Rasch, a Danish psychometrician, is reviewed and its application to occupational educational testing discussed. The Rasch model is an adaptation from the theory of latent trait analysis. According to it, answering an item correctly is a function of the difficulty of the item and the ability…

This study compared the causal attribution by sex for academic failures of 38 learning disabled and 38 nondisabled elementary school students. The relationship between different attributional tendencies and a reading persistence task were also examined. (BS)

Discrepancies between the K-ABC and its theoretical base of simultaneous and sequential mental processing; technical and design problems related to disproportionate subtest contributions of the Simultaneous Scale to the Mental Processing Composite; the method of subtest-specific variance computation and use in interpretation; and utility with…

This paper describes an assessment of community college student knowledge in the liberal arts at two-year colleges in Southern California. A survey instrument with multiple choice questions covering five liberal arts subject areas was distributed to 4,200 students in randomly selected classes at ten colleges. More than 2,500 questionnaires were…

Results of the study indicate that the 3-choice, selected-response tests often utilized in programs of this type do not provide an accurate indication of end-of-year achievement for many children, and their continued use is not recommended. (Authors)

To help give elementary school physical education students a greater appreciation of their own progress and to increase their motivation to achieve, a club-oriented incentive program was established. Students were tested in skills taught at each grade level and those meeting the requirements were awarded club membership certificates. (PP)

A physical education teacher has created a recordkeeping system which maintains a continuous record of each student's progress in fitness tests, basic motor skills, specific play skills, and interpersonal behavior. The system helps with student motivation, administration, decision making, and building parental support. (PP)

A computerized adaptive test (CAT) based on the nominal response model (NR CAT) was implemented, and the performance of the NR CAT and a CAT based on the three-parameter logistic model was compared. The NR CAT produced trait estimates comparable to those of the three-parameter test. (SLD)

Sixty teachers responded to questions about the permissibility of 51 possible test modifications for pupils with disabilities on South Carolina-mandated criterion-referenced tests. Results indicated that teachers were not very knowledgeable about which modifications are allowed, and with few exceptions, special educators were no more informed than…

A method for obtaining curriculum-based estimates of student achievement is described. These estimates can be obtained through the use of a set of curriculum weights designed to reflect student opportunity to learn. If the match between the presented curriculum and test content is low, then the curriculum weights can be used to minimize potential…