Three tests with increasingly more difficult sentence structures, developed for use with children at fourth-grade level or below in reading vocabulary and in mathematical computations, were administered to 30 eighth-grade Ss. Results revealed a significant difference between the test with greater syntactical complexity and the two other tests.…

The purposes of this research study were to develop and field test anchor-based judgmental methods for enabling test specialists to estimate item difficulty statistics. The study consisted of three related field tests. In each, researchers worked with six Law School Admission Test (LSAT) test specialists and one or more of the LSAT subtests. The…

This paper discusses the limitations of Classical Test Theory, the purpose of Item Response Theory/Latent Trait Measurement models, and the step-by-step calculations in the Rasch measurement model. The paper explains how Item Response Theory (IRT) transforms person abilities and item difficulties into the same metric for test-independent and…

This paper discusses the use of two theories of item analysis and test construction, their strengths and weaknesses, and applications to the design of the Hawaii State Test of Essential Competencies (HSTEC). Traditional analyses of the data collected from the HSTEC field test were viewed from the perspectives of item difficulty levels and item…

This paper presents an application of the bookmark procedure to a test comprised of increasing text difficulty levels. The Test of English Proficiency for Adults (TEPA) was used for this study. Three forms of the TEPA were field tested in 1999 with approximately 1,000 non-native English speaking students enrolled in English-as-a-Second-Language…

A common practice in some certification fields (e.g., information technology) is to draw items from an item pool randomly and apply a common passing score, regardless of the items administered. Because these tests are commonly used, it is important to determine how accurate the pass/fail decisions are for such tests and whether fairly small,…

The convention for selecting starting points (that is, initial items) on a computerized adaptive test (CAT) is to choose as starting points items of medium difficulty for all examinees. Selecting a starting point based on prior information about an individual's ability was first suggested many years ago, but has been believed unimportant provided…

Research supported in part by U.S. Public Health Service, National Institute of Mental Health. (DD)

Results indicated that negative instances were an integral part of concept acquisiton. The relationship between the positive and negative instances was based upon similarity of irrelevant attributes and sentence difficulty. (Author)

These data support the notion that amount of maternal involvement in task solution is determined partly by task difficulty and the child's ability to complete the tasks presented. (Author)

The extent to which performance is a function of interest will be dependent upon (a) the nature of the task per se (e.g., complex vs. simple); (b) the conditions for task specification (e.g., imposed vs. selected); and (c) characteristics of the performer (e.g., high internality vs. low internality). (Author)

Report on a doctoral dissertation concerned with the problem of whether children self-select reading material that corresponds with their ability to read. (RB)

The present study was an attempt to investigate two motivational interpretations of earlier findings that private speech increases with task difficulty. (Authors)

The present study, and the development of the instrument for the measurement of conservation, arose in the context of wishing to demonstrate finely discriminating individual differences in this cognitive capacity. (Author)