The Strong Interest Inventory (SII) is the most widely used instrument of its type in existence. The inventory is individually administered and can be used with high school students, college students, and adults. It is typically used in vocational counseling. The new 1994 version resembles the original published in 1927 both in the construction of…

The question of reliability in the intellectual assessment of young children is cause for concern among developmental psychologists and diagnosticians. The issue of reliability is confounded by normal variability in skills during early childhood, by the problem of consistency across time of age-appropriate assessment measures, and by the selection…

The purposes of this study were to develop an instrument to measure students' attitude toward statistics (STATS), and to define the underlying dimensions that comprise the STATS. The instrument consists of 24 items. The sample included 79 male and 97 female students from the statistics classes at the College of Education and the College of…

To address the need for writing assessment tools, two analytic measures for evaluating managerial writing were used: the Analysis of Argument Measure based on Toulmin's (1958) elements of an argument, and the Persuasive Adaptiveness Measure, which draws on the Delia, Kline, and Burleson (1979) ranking system for scoring the degree of social…

This paper reports on evaluations of a projective measure of self-esteem adapted from the Tasks of Emotional Development (TED). The evaluations were conducted in 7 studies with a total sample of 416 children and adults. The revised TED uses a five-point scoring system ranging from negative to positive self-esteem. Interrater reliability in the…

Teacher-principal relations play an important role in creating a positive school climate. This paper describes findings of a study that sought to: (1) determine the reliability of the Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire--Rutgers Secondary (OCDQ-RS) in a South African context, and (2) measure the openness of the organizational climates…

Early intervention has shifted in focus to family centered assessment and treatment. The Comprehensive Evaluation of Family Functioning was developed to meet the need for accurate family assessment, but limited psychometric information on the measure is available. The present research investigated the psychometric properties of the CEFF with a…

Two analyses of variance (ANOVA) models for item scores are compared. The first is an items by subject random effect ANOVA. The second is a mixed effects ANOVA with items fixed and subjects random. Comparisons regarding reliability, Cronbach's alpha coefficient, psychometric inference, and inter-item covariance structure are made between the…

Using a 6-week, test-retest design with 37 third-grade students, the stability of the Reading Style Inventory (RSI) was assessed. The consistency of the recommended reading method interventions that derive from the RSI was also examined. The RSI consists of 52 items organized into two sections. The first section contains 14 three-option questions…

The development of a project to assess the effectiveness of schools in a large urban school district is described in this paper, with a focus on improving the validity of school effectiveness instruments. Purposes of the project were to develop a methodology for reporting effective school strategies and to generate a broader profile of schools'…

A pictorial-rating-scale sociometric instrument was administered to 91 middle-socioeconomic status first- and third-grade children two times, four weeks apart under two conditions, using a three-step and a five-step rating scale. No significant overall differences in reliability was found between the three-step and the five-step scale. However, in…

This article first describes the growing trend of using criterion referenced tests, and then explores the need for setting standards for these types of tests. (RC)

The relationship between students' scores on a verbal meaning test and their degrees of confidence in item responses was investigated. Subjects were black undergraduate students and they were administered a verbal meaning test by following a confidence testing procedure. (Author/BJG)

This study evaluated the Five P's (Parent/Professional Preschool Performance Profile) observational scale through which preschool teachers and parents evaluate the behavior of disabled or nondisabled children in natural settings while the children interact with familiar adults over prolonged periods of time. Developmental skills and interfering…