Describes a computer program for designing tests and grading students in a college chemistry course. (RAO)

The study determined if a revision in the spatial organization of the response format of the O.V. subtest of the Test of General Abilities, Level I, significantly affected the test performance of 88 six- and seven-year-old Puerto Rican pupils from bilingual classes in three public schools in a large Connecticut city. (NQ)

Programs are described for the construction and analysis of student evaluation questionnaires and rating scales that are custom-designed for individual course instructors. Minor modifications would permit the use of these programs for other kinds of questionnaires and rating scales as well as for achievement tests. (Author)

Offers suggestions for designing a management questionnaire and interpreting employee responses so that executives may make an informed decision on whether to support an intervention. Highlights include employee perceptions on competing goals; supervisory suggestions and employee reactions; and a case study. (Author/LRW)

Scales constructed using principal components and Rasch measurement methods are compared under conditions of unclear constructs and marginal sample sizes with three data sets of increasing complexity. Results of the two methods were identical when data were stable and the structure unidimensional. (SLD)

Licensure and certification decisions are usually based on a chain of inference from results of a practice analysis to test specifications, the test, examinee performance, and a pass-fail decision. This article focuses on the design of practice analyses and translation of practice analyses results into test specifications. (SLD)

Documents the development of an adult sex offender risk assessment tool. A risk scale was developed based upon criminal and therapeutic outcomes of 494 sex offenders. The final risk scale included prior juvenile felony convictions, prior adult felony convictions, victim being intoxicated, denial in therapy, sexual deviance in therapy, and…

Describes an extension to the Rasch model for fundamental measurement in which there is parameterization not only for examinee ability and item difficulty but also for judge severity. Discusses variants of this model and judging plans, and explains its use in an empirical testing situation. (SLD)

Constructed four different kinds of test sections using three methods of test assembly that incorporate the goals of simultaneous moderation of the impact of gender, African American status, and Hispanic-American status, resulting in 10 test forms completed by at least 7,000 test takers per form. Discusses the effects of moderating impact in this…

Considers the situation in which content or administrative considerations limit the way in which a test can be partitioned to estimate the internal consistency reliability of the total test score. Demonstrates that a single-valued estimate of the total score reliability is possible only if an assumption is made about the comparative size of the…

Describes the field testing of the Mississippi Assessment Technique for Identifying Learning Disabilities in Adults (MATILDA) with 97 inmates, 50 undergraduates, and 8 students diagnosed as learning disabled. Reports how the test can be used as a preliminary screening device in adult basic education. (SK)

Presents two mathematical programming approaches for the assembly of ability tests from item pools calibrated under a multidimensional item response theory model. Item selection is based on the Fisher information matrix. Illustrates the method through empirical examples for a two-dimensional mathematics item pool. (SLD)

Three groups of subject-matter experts reviewed the content validity of the Newcomer Socialization Questionnaire. Its psychometric properties were supported in a study of 492 employed students; the study was replicated with 320 newly hired workers. Socialization dimensions were positively correlated with job satisfaction and organizational…

Studied the impact of systematic item feature variation on item statistical characteristics and the degree to which such information could be used as collateral information to supplement examinee performance data and reduce pretest sample size by generating 2 families of 48 word problem variants for the Graduate Record Examinations. Results with…

Introduces a framework for systematizing the design of language performance assessments and explicating the role of tasks within them. Their design outlines fundamental components that must be rationalized and operationalized in order for performance assessment to produce coherent evidence of examinees' abilities. (Author/VWL)