Background: The PAS-ADD Checklist is designed to screen for likely mental health problems in people with intellectual disabilities (ID). The specificity of recommended subscales derived from diagnostic criteria is unclear. This paper therefore investigates the factor structure of the PAS-ADD Checklist to determine the adequacy of empirically…

In this chapter, the authors focus on issues of validity in measuring student learning as a prospective indicator of institutional effectiveness. Other chapters in this volume include reference to specific approaches to measuring student learning for accountability purposes, such as through standardized tests, authentic samples of student work,…

The term "intervention validity" refers to the extent to which assessment results can be used to guide the selection of interventions and evaluation of outcomes. In this article, the authors review the defining attributes of rating scales that distinguish them from other assessment tools, assumptions regarding the use of rating scales to…

This study developed an original instrument that measures pragmatic comprehension in Japanese as a foreign language (JFL). It examined the ability to comprehend implied meaning encoded in conventional and nonconventional features and the effect of proficiency on comprehension. There were 63 college students of Japanese at 2 proficiency levels who…

Student evaluations of advising (SEA) are often limited to student ratings of the faculty member's advising skills. As with teaching evaluations, ratings of SEA may not be the best reflection of the advisor's performance. In this study, the author analyzed SEA to determine the relationship between student characteristics and evaluation items.…

N. Stewart, G. D. A. Brown, and N. Chater's relative judgment model includes three core assumptions that enable it to predict accurately the vast majority of "classical" phenomena in absolute identification choices, but not the time taken to make them, including sequential effects, such as assimilation and contrast. These core assumptions, coupled…

Content balancing is an important issue in the design and implementation of computerized adaptive testing (CAT). Content-balancing techniques that have been applied in fixed content balancing, where the number of items from each content area is fixed, include constrained CAT (CCAT), the modified multinomial model (MMM), modified constrained CAT…

The Personality Psychopathology Five (PSY-5) is a model of personality psychopathology assessed in adult populations with a set of Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) scales. The authors examine the reliability and validity of recently developed lower-order facet subscales for each of these five domains, with an emphasis on…

This article reports a reliability study of two versions of the Vocabulary Levels Test at the 5000 word level. This study was motivated by a finding from an ongoing longitudinal study of vocabulary acquisition that Version A and Version B of Vocabulary Levels Test at the 5000 word level were not parallel. In order to investigate this issue,…

Lissitz and Samuelsen (2007) propose a new framework for conceptualizing test validity that separates analysis of test properties from analysis of the construct measured. In response, the author of this article reviews fundamental characteristics of test validity, drawing largely from seminal writings as well as from the accepted standards. He…

Mackintosh and Bennett's [Mackintosh, N. J. and Bennett, E. S, (2005). ''What do Raven's Matrices measure? An analysis in terms of sex differences.'' Intelligence 33: 663-674.] study shows that males outperform females in some APM items but not in others, implicating that these items are measuring discriminable mental processes. The present…

Research indicates the learning process among others things are influenced by have a diverse faculty. While the population of students in college across the United States is significantly more diverse than ever, diversity among faculty members did not concurrently occur (Smith & Moreno, 2006) and in order to maintain student diversity the…

The purpose of this study was to develop a test of academic readiness for first grade instruction in Thailand. Test of Academic Readiness (TAR) consists of six domains: verbal, visual, memory, math, logical, and general knowledge. Two pilot studies were carried out and a main study tested items in those domains. Rasch model was used to assess the…

The common factor model assumes that the linear coefficients (intercepts and factor loadings) linking the observed variables to the latent factors are fixed coefficients (i.e., common for all participants). When the observed variables are participants' observed responses to stimuli, such as their responses to the items of a questionnaire, the …

This study aimed at investigating the psychometric properties of two inventories for the measurement of learning style preferences in a Greek sample: Kolb's (1985) Learning Style Inventory (LSI) and the Index of Learning Styles (ILS) by Felder & Soloman (1999). The inventories were administered in a total of 340 Greek university undergraduate…