Many studies in the chemical education literature report students' alternative conceptions in chemistry and the difficulty they present for future learning. In this paper, we review existing diagnostic tools used to uncover students' alternative conceptions in chemistry and suggest that there are two fundamental issues with such instruments,…

Typical validation studies on standard setting models, most notably the Angoff and modified Angoff models, have ignored construct development, a critical aspect associated with all conceptualizations of measurement processes. Stone compared the Angoff and objective standard setting (OSS) models and found that Angoff failed to define a legitimate…

This article reviews "Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-Third Edition" (WIAT-III), which is designed to assess students' skills in listening, speaking, reading, writing, and mathematics. The test can identify an individual's strengths and weaknesses, assist professionals who are determining whether a student is eligible for special…

Superintendents must manage all programs within a school district, but many superintendents do not possess the knowledge and skills necessary to successfully direct a district's special education program. This study examined superintendents' perceptions of their knowledge of special education and the importance of that knowledge to their practice.…

What do learners do when they control whether to engage in massed or spaced practice? According to theories by Son (2004) and by Metcalfe and Kornell (2005), the tendency for learners to choose spaced practice over massed practice should decline as item difficulty becomes greater. Support originally was obtained when pairs containing unfamiliar…

Objective: The Coordinators of Psychiatric Education (COPE) Residency In-Training Exam is a formative exam for Canadian psychiatric residents that was reconstructed using assessment best practices. An assessment of psychometric properties was subsequently performed on the exam to ensure preliminary validity and reliability. Methods: An exam…

This study examined measurement invariance (i.e., configural invariance, metric invariance, scalar invariance) of the Chinese version of Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI-II-C) across college males and females and compared gender differences on depression at the latent factor mean level. Two samples composed of 402 male college students and 595…

The psychometric properties of measures of self-efficacy for the six themes of Holland's theory were examined using item response theory. Item and scale quality were compared across levels of the trait continuum; all the scales were highly reliable but differentiated better at some levels of the continuum than others. Applications for adaptive…

Objective: Examine the validity of a self-report measure of eating competence with low-income women. Methods: Twenty-five females (18-49 years old) recruited from low-income venues in Pennsylvania completed cognitive testing through an iterative interview process. Respondents' oral responses were compared to researchers' intended meaning of…

Item responses to Digit Span and Letter-Number Sequencing were analyzed to develop a better-refined model of the two working memory tasks using the finite mixture (FM) modeling method. Models with ordinal latent traits were found to better account for the independent sources of the variability in the tasks than those with continuous traits, and…

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is a comparative assessment of the achievement of students in many countries. In the present study, a rigorous independent evaluation was conducted of a representative sample of TIMSS science test items because item quality influences the validity of the scores used to inform…

Videoconferencing offers new opportunities for language testers to assess speaking ability in low-stakes diagnostic tests. To be considered a trusted testing tool in language testing, a test should be examined employing appropriate validation processes [Chapelle, C.A., Jamieson, J., & Hegelheimer, V. (2003). "Validation of a web-based ESL…

The present study examined the technical adequacy of curriculum-based measures (CBMs) of early numeracy. Six 1-min early mathematics tasks were administered to 137 kindergarten and first-grade students, along with an omnibus test of early mathematics. The CBM measures included Count Out Loud, Quantity Discrimination, Number Identification, Missing…

Community engagement professionals and partners serve as, work with, study, and build the capacity of boundary spanners. To augment knowledge about these functions, the Weerts-Sandmann Boundary Spanning Conceptual Framework (2010) has been operationalized through a survey instrument to examine community engagement boundary-spanning behaviors by…

The measurement of treatment integrity is critical to evaluate the efficacy and effectiveness of evidence-based programs (EBPs) designed to improve the developmental outcomes of young children at risk of emotional/behavioral disorders. Unfortunately, the science of treatment integrity measurement lags behind the development and evaluation of EBP…