The aim of this study was to develop a valid and reliable instrument to measure Turkish kindergarten students' understandings of some science concepts and scientific inquiry processes which are grounded in the Turkish Preschool Curriculum. The sample of the study was 371 kindergarten students, 12 Subject Area Experts (SAE), and 7 Turkish Language…

On the basis of a validation study of a new test for assessing low-achieving adolescents' reading comprehension skills--the SALT-reading--we analyzed two issues relevant to the field of reading test development. Using the test results of 200 seventh graders, we examined the possibility of identifying reading comprehension subskills and the effects…

This study's purpose was to modify the Screening Tool for Autism in Two-Year-Olds (STAT) into a Taiwanese version called T-STAT. Study 1 included 15 children with Autism and 15 children with Developmental Delay (DD) or language impairment (LI) aged between 24 and 35 months. Study 2 had 77 young children with Autism, PDD-NOS, or DD/LI as a…

What happens when students go to college? An important outcome of college attendance is student cognitive development. Part of that developmental process is learning how to address contrasting values, beliefs, knowledge structures, and worldviews critically. This study addressed the relationship between cognitive and Christian-faith development in…

With the widespread use of classroom exams in nursing education there is a great need for research on current practices in nursing education regarding this form of assessment. The purpose of this study was to explore how nursing faculty members make decisions about using best practices in classroom test construction, item analysis, and revision in…

Two consortia, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced) and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), are currently developing comprehensive, technology-based assessment systems to measure students' attainment of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The consequences of the consortia…

Recent research on the design of social experiments has highlighted the effects of different design choices on research findings. Since experiments rarely collect their samples using random selection, in order to address these external validity problems and design choices, recent research has focused on two areas. The first area is on methods for…

In the present paper and the discussion that follows, the author presents aspects of test construction and a careful description of instructional objectives. Constructing tests involves several stages such as describing language objectives, selecting appropriate test task, devising and assembling test tasks, and devising a scoring system for…

This article reviews the Conners Early Childhood (Conners EC; Conners, 2009), a behavior and development rating scale intended to assess children in early childhood, specifically defined as ages 2 to 6 years. Using multiple informants across multiple settings, the Conners EC is administered for the purpose of early identification of disorders or…

We review a popular method for collecing data--Web-based surveys. Although Web surveys are popular, one major concern is their typically low response rates. Using the Dillman et al. (2009) approach, we designed, pre-tested, and implemented a survey on climate change with Extension professionals in the Southeast. The Dillman approach worked well,…

Pondering a math problem while she swings her sneakered feet from a chair, 12-year-old Andrea Guevara is helping researchers design an assessment that will shape the learning of 19 million students. The 8th grader, who came to the United States from Ecuador three years ago, is trying out two ways of providing English-language support on a…

The consequences associated with the uses and interpretations of scores for many credentialing testing programs have important implications for a range of stakeholders. Within licensure settings specifically, results from examination programs are often one of the final steps in the process of assessing whether individuals will be allowed to enter…

This piece makes a case for using assessment to understand and identify the needs of learners and introduces the three reprints that follow: "Twenty Common Testing Mistakes for EFL Teachers to Avoid," "Coming to Grips with Progress Testing: Some Guidelines for Its Design," and "Purposeful Language Assessment: Selecting the Right Alternative Test."

The area of progress testing has been neglected and has lagged far behind developments in language teaching and testing in general. In most classrooms today, English is taught through communicative textbooks that provide neither accompanying tests nor any guidance for test construction. Teachers are on their own in constructing tests to measure…

Research on indicators related to the state of child well-being is a growing field that has experienced several changes over time. The growing supply of data on children, as well as the need to facilitate conclusions and to track trends, has led researchers to develop a number of child well-being indexes. This paper critically reviews the most…