It is commonly proposed that educational and psychological assessments consist of a multifaceted procedure that incorporates scores from a variety of tests and resources. Little guidance has been offered regarding the method for selecting a combination of testing instruments used in an evaluation. The problem of test selection is discussed in the…

A framework, or classification scheme, is provided for displaying the spectrum of criterion-referenced tests. This framework illustrates that no single type of test can be identified as the absolute prototype criterion-referenced test. It is shown that over the past 115 years criterion-referenced testing has grown to be a many-faceted concept, its…

Intended to help the laity find their way through the confusion and controversy surrounding minimum competency testing (MCT), this paper explains what MCT is, acknowledges its limitations, weighs the criticisms, and shows how MCT may be used constructively for the benefit of students and for the improvement of schools. Highlights from the paper…

This guide is divided into four parts. Part I, an introduction, contains a discussion of why item banking has failed thus far to become a widely accepted procedure for test development, as well as some miscellaneous information on item banking that may be useful. In Part 2, completed questionnaires from 22 organizations with item banks give…

This report describes the design and results of an experiment to test whether a $10.00 payment to participate in the national Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (HANES) would significantly increase the response rate for the survey. The design and findings of the study, as well as a comparison of response rates prior to and following…

A project designed to determine the relevance of existing standardized achievement tests to the goals of individualized instruction is among the ongoing research activities of Project PLAN, a computer-supported individualized education program. Standardized achievement tests (including the Metropolitan Readiness Test, the Scholastic Aptitude…

Some of the conceptual and methodological problems in identifying and measuring creativity in young children are presented. Among the issues raised are: (1) the prediction of validity of creativity tests, (2) the problem of predicting adult creativity from evidence of childhood creativity, and (3) the need to identify and adequately measure the…

The purpose of this paper is to prove that one currently recommended method of obtaining the reliability of an instrument defined on a population of aggregate units is invalid. This method randomly splits the aggregate into two halves, correlates the two half unit scores by a Pearson product moment correlation coefficient, and corrects the…

A need for measurement exists not only in academic events but also in the affective domain. The author presents a procedure for quantification of affective behavior. The procedure contains three stages. One is the conceptualization stage in which personal meanings of elements in the affective domain are examined. Another is the crucial…

In this speech given at the 1976 annual breakfast of the National Council on Measurement in Education Dr. Thomas J. Fitzgibbon, outgoing president of NCME, responds to critics of standardized testing and outlines the correct uses for it. He believes that many criticisms of standardized testing are due to misunderstanding or a lack of information.…

The relationship between variables in applied and experimental research is often investigated by the use of extreme groups. Recent analytical work has provided an extreme group procedure that is more powerful than the standard correlational approach. The present article provides procedures to optimize power and thusly resources in such studies.…

This article lists a series of ten defects that account for most of the inaccuracies in achievement tests. (Author/AM)

A few hints for teaching students the skills needed for taking standardized tests. (MM)