Effective school leadership is key to students' academic success. But the development of effective school leadership has been seriously hampered by the lack of technically sound tools to assess and monitor leaders' performance. With support from The Wallace Foundation, a team from Vanderbilt has been developing such an assessment system, and this…

This article argues that if multimodal and new literacies are to become common practices in schools, they have to be included in both school and provincial/state large-scale assessment programmes. Building on current criterion-referenced testing in Newfoundland and Labrador which assesses a range of literacies (viewing, reading, writing,…

Designed to assess the reading and writing skills of preservice and inservice teachers, this criterion referenced test assesses four skills areas following the reading of a selected professional article. The skill areas assessed are the ability to (1) understand the professional vocabulary used in the selection, (2) answer literal level…

Item analysis procedures appropriate for domain-referenced classroom testing are described. A conceptual framework within which item statistics can be considered and promising statistics in light of this framework are presented. The sampling fluctuations of the more promising item statistics for sample sizes comparable to the typical classroom…

Discusses the difficulty of documenting the effectiveness of preschool programs and relates this to measuring instruments used and the type of design selected. Methods are provided to assist psychologists and educators to evaluate preschool programs. Three studies of preschool programs using different designs which involve published…

The case for criterion-referenced measurement is discussed versus the conventional norm-referenced grading methods. (Author/BP)

To assist instructors in implementing Missouri's Vocational Instructional Management System into the Food Production, Management, and Services Programs, this guide sets forth the competencies identified and validated by occupational food service instructors and personnel from the food service industry. A minimum of two performance objectives per…

A computer simulation was undertaken to determine the effects of using Huynh's single-administration estimates of the decision consistency indices for agreement and coefficient kappa, under conditions that violated the beta-binomial assumption. Included in the investigation were two unimodal score distributions that fit the model and two bimodal…

Although effective and efficient assessment procedures are crucial to the success of organizational training programs, the tests used for both student and program evaluation are often developed by instructional designers (IDS) and subject matter experts (SMEs) with little formal training in test development. This paper summarizes the major…

Discrepancies among the standards produced by different criterion-referenced standard-setting techniques may be the result of a failure to adequately define the minimally competent candidate. Current research in this area is reviewed in terms of three categories: studies in which no formal assistance in conceptualization is given to judges,…

Intended to provide a broad introduction to the subject of student assessment, this booklet begins by discussing the role of assessment in any systematic approach to course or curriculum design and explains the difference between assessment and evaluation. Four basic features of a good student assessment procedure are then discussed, i.e.,…

This paper evaluates the magnitude of the total error in estimates of the difference between an examinee's domain score and the cutoff score. An observed score based on a random sample of items from the domain, and an estimated cutoff score derived from a judgmental standard setting procedure are assumed. The work of Brennan and Lockwood (1980) is…

A systematic approach for assessing language competencies of bilingual students is developed. Two issues are clarified. First, the issue of examining separately the four language skills is looked at, as well as the need to consider other related factors including cognitive functions operative in language processing, affective forces, and…

Criterion-referenced evaluation (CRE) describes achievement in performance terms, whereas norm-referenced evaluation (NRE) compares the performance of one individual to that of others with respect to a given evaluation instrument. Vocational educators who base their programs on behaviorism commonly evaluate student performance from a CRE…

Describes how one small school district developed performance objectives and wrote their own criterion-referenced reading tests to evaluate kindergarten and first grade children in a reading program supplimentally funded by the state. (TO)