This article describes the significant gains in student achievement in an urban elementary school when teachers worked together to develop, administer, and review assessment items. In grade-level teams, teachers completed item analyses and engaged in instructional conversations about students' needed instruction. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)

Holistic perspectives in career development have focused attention on complexity as important for counselors using assessment techniques. Increased emphasis on subjectivity has resulted in greater focus on qualitative measures versus traditional psychometric tests. These developments reflect issues such as the idiographic-nomothetic distinction…

Cross-cultural adaptation of study instruments is a difficult, time-consuming, but arguably cost-effective process. If conducted properly, it has the advantage that the translated study instruments are accurate, easy to understand, accessible, and culturally appropriate to the target audience and produce reliable and valid data. This article…

The National Staff Development Council (NSDC), a private, nonprofit association, has outlined high standards for educator professional learning. One demonstration of NSDC's commitment to the goal of ensuring all schools support and use high standards for professional learning is the organization's investment in developing an instrument to assess…

Cognitive diagnosis (CD) plays an important role in intelligent tutoring system. Computerized adaptive testing (CAT) is adaptive, fair, and efficient, which is suitable to large-scale examination. Traditional cognitive diagnostic test needs quite large number of items, the efficient and tailored CAT could be a remedy for it, so the CAT with…

Despite the existence of little empirical evidence for their effectiveness, many techniques have been suggested for writing multiple-choice items. The option "none of the above" (NA) has been widely used although a recent review of empirical studies of NA suggests that, while generally decreasing the difficulty index, NA also decreases…

Simulations were performed to verify the accuracy with which the Mantel-Haenszel (MH) and Rasch PROX procedures recover simulated item bias. Several standard error estimators for the MH procedure were evaluated. Item bias is recovered satisfactorily by both techniques under all simulated conditions. The proposed MH standard error estimators have…

This is a user's guide to the Student-Problem Package (SPP), a software package for the IBM-PC that provides three sub-programs for analyzing item response patterns. These analyses are based on student-problem (S-P) curve theory. The SPP User's Guide provides: (1) a brief introduction to response pattern analysis; (2) an overview of the…

The content of each of the Occupational and Nonoccupational scales on the Strong Vocational Interest Blank for Women was described in terms of the categories used for the Basic Interest scales. Several shortcomings of the SVIB-W were noted. (Author)

The results of data analysis based on the multiplicative binomial model (MLTBIN) are compared with dichotomous data analyzed by using the simple logistic model (SLM). Specifically, the paper focuses on the issues of fit to these Rasch Models and estimates of item difficulty. The data indicate that the SLM and MLTBIN are not comparable in the…

Research supported in part by the Research Foundation of Oklahoma State University.

Supported by National Institute of Mental Health, USPHS, Grant M-4186 and by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, USPHS, Grant I POI HD-01762-02

Study supported by Research Grant RT-11 from the Social and Rehabilitation Services, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

OBJECTIVITY IN MENTAL TESTING REQUIRES THAT TEST CALIBRATION BE INDEPENDENT OF WHICH PERSONS ARE USED FOR THE CALIBRATION AND THAT PERSON MEASUREMENT BE INDEPENDENT OF WHICH ITEMS ARE USED FOR THE MEASUREMENT. PRESENT PRACTICE IS NOT OBJECTIVE, BUT COULD BE SO, AS SHOWN BY THE EXAMPLE HERE PRESENTED. DATA COME FROM THE RESPONSES OF 976 LAW…