Reviews a dozen basic questions about passing scores on state-mandated competency testing programs for students, teachers, administrators, and other education personnel. Condemns the "cardiac" approach (or traditonal 80 percent standard) in favor of procedures that systematically incorporate judgment with a variety of performance data.…

Interviewed testing coordinators in 20 New Jersey public schools to identify and describe current practices and problems in testing program content, planning, and participation; test selection and scheduling; preparation of test administrators and test takers; and test scoring, recording, and reporting. (JAC)

The relationship between the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales-Classroom Edition and its predecessor, the Vineland Social Maturity Scale was examined with 54 educable and trainable mentally retarded children. The concurrent validity of the two scales was moderate. The mean scores from the newer instrument were significantly lower. (Author/CL)

Learning disabled and mentally retarded elementary and secondary students (N=343) exhibited significant differences on scores of three tests designed to measure the same area of achievement. Results suggested that specific abilities of pupils interact with aspects of the test items. (CL)

Hearing-impaired students (N=508) were administered a language-arts achievement test containing 25 items drawn from a computerized item bank developed with hearing students. Results showed that the items did not form an adequate Rasch-based test. Furthermore, the difficulty order of the items differed in the hearing and hearing-impaired…

Because test scores are ordinal not cordinal attributes, the average test score often is a misleading way to summarize the scores of a group of individuals. Similarly, correlation coefficients may be misleading summary measures of association between test scores. Proper, readily interpretable, summary statistics are developed from a theory of…

Meta-Analysis of 59 studies revealed that neither the Frostig Developmental Test of Visual Perception nor the Frostig program for the development of visual perception was advantageous for handicapped students. (CL)

The authors provide information about test construction and testing practices in order to help parents and teachers to ask important and critical questions about them. Issues pertinent to the appropriate selection, use, and interpretation of tests are presented. (Author/CL)

The article describes a review of educational records of 74 hearing-impaired students. Specific attention was focused on reports concerning psychological evaluations and their components and administration. It was concluded that psychological assessment was less than adequate. The need for skill remediation among school psychologists is then…

Misreadings of pencil answer marks on test answer sheets by optical scanners cause scoring errors. Twenty-six different pencils were tested for readability differences when optically scanned. Complete light and dark marks scanned perfectly for 18 pencils. Totals for all six mark types ranged from 947 to 1726 out of 1800. (BS)

Samples in research on individual and group differences may be selected based on whole scores which differ from the population mean. Children are diagnosed in clinical practice with a whole score. These procedures produce regression to the population mean which can affect accuracy and adequacy of part score interpretations. (Author/DWH)

The variability in the testing procedures of football helmets is examined in this article. Inadequacies in standards for recertifying helmets indicates the probability of unsafe helmets being used. (Author/DF)

Discusses the Miscue Reading Inventory and offers an alternative system that keeps its strengths and completeness while eliminating most of its weak points. (FL)

Addresses the issues of whether test scores are affected by the prior availability of the items on a test. Concludes that, while disclosing items significantly affects test scores, the magnitude of the disclosure effect drecreases with an increase in the size of the disclosed pool. (EKN)

The purpose of this report is to describe a process for creating unique multiple linear regression problems for each student. Three formulas were utilized to define intercorrelations between variables. (Editor)