A study involving 570 individuals with mental retardation developed the Screening Tool of Feeding Problems, an assessment designed to identify feeding problems presented by persons with mental retardation, and thus facilitate the process of identifying who would benefit from some type of behavioral or medical intervention. Psychometric data are…

This article offers some solutions used in the assembly of the computerized Uniform Certified Public Accountancy (CPA) licensing examination as practical alternatives for operational programs producing large numbers of forms. The Uniform CPA examination was offered as an adaptive multistage test (MST) beginning in April of 2004. Examples of…

The purpose of this study was to explore the response patterns of African American students to the state certification questions. More specifically, the participants' explanations of their responses and their perceptions of the source of knowledge they used to answer the questions were discussed. To achieve this purpose, three research questions…

This article provides practical advice on the development of test and item specifications. Because my experience has been with English as a second or foreign language, most examples are taken from this field, although they can be applied to other language tests. The article first discusses steps in the process of test development, including…

The importance of standardized test results is becoming more prevalent in the structure of classroom instruction and the operation of schools throughout the nation due to pressure on educators and students from various levels of authority. This study looks at the relationship between classroom instruction and standardized test content and the…

The Nation's Report Card[TM] informs the public about the academic achievement of elementary and secondary students in the United States and its jurisdictions, including Puerto Rico. In 2003, a trial NAEP mathematics assessment was administered in Spanish to public school students at grades 4 and 8 in Puerto Rico. Based on preliminary analyses of…

This paper presents the assessment and item specifications for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2009 mathematics assessment. "Chapter Two" contains descriptions of the five major content areas of mathematics (Number Properties and Operations, Measurement, Geometry, Data Analysis, Statistics, and Probability, and…

This manual has been produced to familiarize data users with the procedures followed for data collection and processing for the base year through second follow-up of the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002). It also provides the necessary documentation for use of the data files, as they appear on the ELS:2002 base-year to second…

Validation efforts typically focus around what, exactly, is measured by an instrument(s), and whether what is measured corresponds to the theoretical domain(s) originally specified. The authors' goal for this article is to build instruments focused around measuring the mathematical knowledge used in teaching: not only the content that teachers…

This booklet presents the Reading Framework for the 1992 and 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which contains the rationale for the aspects of reading assessed and the criteria for the development of the assessment. The booklet notes that the new reading assessment examines students' abilities to construct, extend, and…

Test items are designed to be representative of the subject areas that they measure and to reflect the importance of specific domains or item types within those subject areas. Content validity is achieved by content specification and number of items in each content domain included in the design of the test. However, largely due to the normal…

This paper presents a multistage adaptive testing test development paradigm that promises to handle content balancing and other test development needs, psychometric reliability concerns, and item exposure. The bundled multistage adaptive testing (BMAT) framework is a modification of the computer-adaptive sequential testing framework introduced by…

This document is a supplement to the Test Content Description for the Georgia High School Test in Mathematics. The sample items are representative of items on the actual Georgia High School Tests. The strands (major areas) being tested are: (1) Number and Composition (17% to 19% of the test); (2) Data Analysis (19-21% of the test); (3) Measurement…

This document is a supplement to the Test Content Description for the Georgia High School Test in Science. The sample items are representative of items on the actual Georgia High School Tests. The strands (major areas) being tested are: (1) Process/Research Skills (30% to 32% of the test); (2) Physical Science (33% to 35% of the test); and…

This paper traces some ideas produced by adolescent students when deciding among different explanations of a past situation. For this purpose, a sample of 270 Portuguese students ranging from 12 to 20 years old, attending 7th to 11th grades, was analyzed in a qualitative approach. Students' ideas were mapped through five levels of progression, in…