Can community colleges make better use of data to improve student outcomes? That's the fundamental idea behind "Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count," a bold initiative launched in 2003 by Lumina Foundation for Education to help community college students succeed--particularly, low-income students and students of color, who have…

Editor-in-Chief James L. Morrison interviews Scott Howell, the co-editor of a three-volume book series entitled "Online Assessment and Measurement" that was published in 2006 by IDEA Group. In discussing his own research, Howell first highlights the value of test blueprints as a valuable tool for ensuring an effective alignment of…

The articles published in the "Measurement in Physical Education and Exercise Science" (MPEES) journal over the first 10 volumes were categorized by content area and methodology. The authors have offered opinions here concerning the changes observed over the 10-year period, the areas that are well-represented, and other potential areas of research…

Cultural competence has become a central social work tenet enshrined in the profession's ethical and educational standards. Few measures of cultural competence exist, however, in spite of an increasing array of religious, ethnic, and racial groups in U.S. society. This article develops a new measure to assess cultural competence among one family…

The role of theory in the restructuring of schools and curriculum is discussed. Theory is defined as a set of assumptions from which laws or principles may be derived. The descriptive, analytical, and predictive characteristics of theory are described. The examination of the relationship of theory to practice leads to the conclusion that they are…

A project to field test instruments and procedures for measuring English language proficiency, to be used in a large-scale national household survey, is reported. The major purposes of the field test were to measure the validity of census-type questions for determining language proficiency, using several different bilingual ethnic groups, and to…

Computer-based instruction could have considerable impact on improving the quality of science education. Simulations and interactive problems provide a means for students to explore scientific concepts and experiment without the expense or hazard of using actual materials. This paper focuses on the instructional design process as it relates to the…

Traditional methods of job and task analysis may be categorized as worker-oriented methods focusing on general human behaviors performed by workers in jobs or as job-oriented methods focusing on the technologies involved in jobs. The ability of both types of traditional methods to identify, understand, and communicate the skills needed in high…

This paper reports 20 unsolved problems in educational measurement and points toward what seem to be promising avenues of solution. The first group of concerns involves validity, posing the problems of obtaining suitable validity criteria, determining and measuring the predictor variables that best characterize the traits and proficiencies of…

The Arabic Picture Vocabulary Test (APVT) was derived from the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test in order to provide an estimate of a student's acquired verbal ability in Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic) through his or her aural vocabulary. It is an individually administered norm-referenced power test for students aged 5 to 9 plus years. Each item…

In recent assessments, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has permitted schools to exclude some students with disabilities or limited English proficiency because it believed that its assessments would not accurately measure the ability and achievement levels of these students. The exclusion of a portion of students from…

This study assessed the ability of high school advanced placement history students to choose the essay topic on which they can get the highest score. A second, equally important, question was whether the score on the chosen topic was more highly related to other indicators of proficiency in history than the score on the unchosen topic. Overall,…

This study was undertaken to test the hypothesis that items of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) containing reference to American people, places, customs, etc., tend to favor examinees who have spent some time living in the United States. Two samples of examinees were drawn from the March 1987 TOEFL administration, one tested in…

Most seasoned test developers recognize the importance of thoughtful decision making when constructing a test. Unfortunately, many classroom achievement tests are created by novice test developed who have not received sufficient instruction in item writing (G. Gulliksen, 1986; R. J. Stiggins, 1991). The result is often a test that is poorly…

This research report explores the extent to which the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS) (Harms and Clifford, 1980) remains a valid instrument when used to make cross-national comparisons of quality, and the advantages and disadvantages of using ECERS for this purpose. ECERS was developed to be used by a trained observer to rate the…