The purpose and results of the state testing programs in Utah are described. At present there are seven major assessment programs conducted under the leadership of the Utah State Office of Education. These include the three components of the Core Assessment Program: Criterion-Referenced Tests and item pools, Writing Assessment, and the new…

Intended both to evaluate the California testing program's success in assessing student achievement in the basic skills and to suggest possible improvements in the program, this report includes an executive summary evaluating current testing procedures, describing experimental studies on new ways of testing and reporting testing information, and…

Developed to promote conservation awareness in elementary students, each of the six grade-level-sequenced activity guides provides: (1) a list of conservation concepts; (2) a criterion-referenced test; (3) a class record sheet; (4) a content guide; and (5) 90 student worksheets (40 for language arts, 20 for mathematics, 20 for social studies and…

This competency-based, individualized learning package, consisting of 50 learning guides, is designed for use by students who are studying to become medical assistants. Included among the topics addressed in the individual learning guides are the following: using and caring for microscopes, understanding medical ethics and law, developing…

This report describes the development, operation, maintenance, and future prospects of the item banks pioneered by the Portland (Oregon) School District. At the time of this report, there were 3,500 mathematics, 2,200 reading, and 2,300 language usage items calibrated under the fixed parameter model of item response theory (IRT) for Grades 3-8.…

This document contains competencies and criterion-referenced test items for the Intermediate Food and Nutrition semester course in Missouri that were derived from the duties and tasks of the Missouri homemaker and identified and validated by home economics teachers and subject matter specialists. The guide is designed to assist home economics…

This guide was developed to assist home economics teachers in implementing the Missouri Vocational Instructional Management System in a housing, home furnishings, and equipment semester course. It contains a minimum of two performance objectives developed and validated for each competency by teachers with expertise in the area of housing, home…

Statewide results of South Carolina's Basic Skills Assessment Program (BSAP) are provided in terms of the percentages of students meeting statewide performance standards in reading, mathematics, writing, and science. BSAP tests were administered statewide on April 23-27, 1990, in grades 1, 2, 3, 6, and 8. The BSAP Exit Examination was administered…

The Kansas Minimum Competency Tests (KMCT) were designed to provide information about student performance on selected minimum competencies in reading and mathematics. The KMCT were criterion referenced tests in which each item was keyed to a minimum competency objective; student performance was measured against a predetermined standard. The tests…

The South Carolina Basic Skills Assessment Program (BSAP) was established by South Carolina legislation enacted in 1978. This report describes BSAP implementation and test results for 1984-85 as prescribed in the legislation. As the schedule for this academic year required, the Cognitive Skills Assessment Battery (CSAB) was administered to all…

In fall 1986, a study was conducted at Florence-Darlington Technical College (South Carolina) to measure the reliability and validity of the TEC-MAT, a newly developed entrance test. The TEC-MAT instrument, a criterion-referenced test consisting of 100 items assessing numerical skills, was field tested among a group of entry-level freshmen already…

It has been recommended that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) specify comprehensive exercise domains to measure academic achievement, and provide a national item pool to measure the objectives in these domains. These domain specifications and item pools would serve to satisfy the increasing demand for valid, accurate, and…

Teacher-made mastery tests were administered in a classroom-sized sample to study their decision consistency. Decision-consistency of criterion-referenced tests is usually defined in terms of the proportion of examinees who are classified in the same way after two test administrations. Single-administration estimates of decision consistency were…

The Adolescent Communication Screen--a criterion-based instrument designed to provide speech-language clinicians a measure for screening the communication skills of students in grades 5 through 12--is described in this document. Included in the description are the instrument's subtests: vocabulary, temporal concepts, language comprehension,…

The language arts objective-item bank contains 100 objectives each represented by five to eight multiple choice items. Grade levels covered are one through eight. The objectives deal with such topics as composition, grammar, literature, phonetic analysis, reading comprehension, structural analysis, study and research skills, vocabulary, and…