A study examined inter-rater reliability on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages/Educational Testing Service (ACTFL/ETS) oral language proficiency rating scale. Seven raters, all elementary or intermediate college Spanish teachers given only brief formal training in the use of the scale, evaluated recorded interviews with…

A target partition analysis (TPA) was used to help seven subject matter experts, with little expertise in testing, evaluate relationships among test items. The subjects were experts in Income Maintenance in the field of public assistance work; they were trainers affiliated with the Professional Development Program's Income Maintenance Training…

A new approach to polychotomous scoring of test items, similar to "max-alpha" scaling (MAS) and known as polyweighting, has been developed. Unlike MAS, this new method of polychotomous scoring provides scoring weights for a given item that are independent of the difficulty of other items in the analysis. Moreover, the scoring weights are…

The Michigan Mathematics Early Placement Test (MMEPT) is an assessment instrument that gives 11th-grade students an appraisal of their mathematical skills in relation to college expectations. Students who take the test receive a report letter that tells them, based upon their test results, approximately where they would be placed in mathematics if…

Application of the Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS) to the assessment of child abuse is described. The CTS is a brief instrument designed to measure three aspects of parent-to-child behavior: (1) reasoning; (2) psychological aggression; and (3) physical aggression. The psychological and physical aggression indexes are intended to measure the…

The reliability and validity of the Inventory of Socially Supportive Behaviors (ISSB), a measure designed to tap behaviors pertaining to the provision of social support, were studied. Data were analyzed on a pre-test sample of 100 adults from a community-based, epidemiologic study of 1,008 black adults in Virginia. Findings are presented on the…

The School Mastery of Reading Test (SMRT) program was designed to give administrators and teachers information about reading performance and recommendations for improving the instructional program. The project includes development of a valid and reliable reading test based on the New York City curriculum in order to assess the potential linkage…

The proposition that the optimal number of options in a multiple choice test item is three was examined. The concept of functional distractor, a plausible wrong answer that is negatively discriminating when total test performance is the criterion, is discussed. Three distinct groups of achievers (high, middle, and low) on a national standardized…

Three standard assessment instruments (Rorschach, Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory and 16PF) were administered to 12 participating Rosebud Sioux Indians--6 males, 6 females. Reports were generated for each instrument. Consensual and unique concepts contained in all the reports were analyzed in order to describe the contents. Six judges, all…

As part of a new teacher evaluation program initiated by the local school board, the Charleston County School District (South Carolina) adopted the Assessments of Performance in Teaching (APT) as a major evaluation tool to assess the teaching performance of annual contract teachers. Since evaluation procedures can ultimately lead to teacher…

This study assessed the interchangeability of the Matthews Youth Test for Health (MYTH) and Hunter-Wolf A-B Rating Scale. Data from 25 elementary teachers and 300 of their students showed these scales to be weakly correlated, and the concordance of their A-B classifications to be only slightly above that expected by chance. Weak agreement was…

A model for the validation of standardized tests of academic achievement upon populations not represented in the samples used to standardize the tests is presented, and the results of a field testing of the model are described. The 1973 editions of the Stanford Achievement Test and the Test of Academic Skills were administered to a sample of…

Thirty-two children aged 7 to 12 participated in a study to determine the reliability of the Ekwall Reading Inventory (ERI) and the Classroom Reading Inventory (CRI). The children were randomly assigned to take one of the two inventories, which were administered by four different specially trained teachers. The study used a test-retest design, in…

Using instructional variables identified by the literature as important in predicting classroom achievement, a bi-polar rating scale was designed to assess the structure of instruction in resource rooms. The data for 158 elementary school children in four school districts were analyzed. The scale evidenced good reliability, both in terms of…

An experimental test battery designed to measure several perceptual abilities was administered to 1,368 (51.8% male) paying clients of the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation (JOCRF) in an effort to identify and measure three perceptual abilities: (1) flexibility of closure; (2) speed of closure; and (3) spatial scanning. Subjects, who ranged in…