This text on foreign language testing provides an overview of testing principles, problems, and practices, and examines the multiple roles of the classroom teacher, as well as the construction and scoring of more formal language tests. The following types or foreign language tests are distinguished: achievement or attainment tests, proficiency…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 15 titles include studies dealing with the following areas: the evaluation of student writing; the assessment of the communicative competence of kindergarten children; formulas for predicting high school reading achievement; an…

Records kept by teachers and data collected by trained observers were examined as alternatives for measuring allocated and engaged instructional time in elementary school classes. The teacher ratings of student engagement did not correlate with observer ratings of engagement, but a high correlation between teacher ratings of engagement and student…

A questionnaire designed to assess seven non-cognitive variables found to be related to college success particularly for minority students (Sedlacek and Brooks, 1976) was administered to two successive samples of incoming freshmen at the University of Maryland, College Park. The Non-Cognitive Questionnaire (NCQ) consists to two nominal items…

Activities and findings of the Statistical Analysis Group in Education (SAGE), which sought (1) to develop and validate financial and nonfinancial indicators of college or university viability and (2) to measure institutional viability of types of colleges related to federal policy goals for higher education. Development of the longitudinal file…

This report describes the instructional quality inventory (IQI), which was developed to provide quality control/evaluation procedures for the instructional system development (ISD). The ISD is described as a method used by the military to develop or revise training courses. IQI procedures are detailed in six sections. Section 1 explains the IQI…

A paired-comparisons measure of distributive justice development, the Distributive Justice Scale (DJS), was developed and validated in four studies. Pictures were drawn to represent the different stages of distributive justice for a given dilemma and the DJS was scored by selecting the child's preferred stage via the picture comparisons for each…

Legal issues of minimum competency testing derive from federal and state constitutional, statutory, and regulatory provisions, and from common law. Constitutional provisions for equal protection, due process, and freedom of belief and privacy, are primarily federal; education provisions are state mandated. Only four court cases have directly…

In a discussion of the value of standardized tests and their implications for effective teaching, the author contends that such tests are useful in keeping those concerned with the learning process focused on the main target. In addition, standardized tests serve to (1) reveal variations in the effectiveness of different instructional procedures…

Using an eight-day hydraulics maintenance course taught by 121 instructors on a regular basis to classes of about 14 students using the same classrooms and materials, the Air Force conducted a study designed to determine instructor measures which correlate with, and are therefore predictive of, student achievement. The study report first discusses…

The Course Entry Inventory was developed to assess the affective characteristics of college students when they enter a course. The four dimensions measured were: affective characteristics upon entry, willingness to undertake course activities and accept instruction, perceived importance of the course, and self-reported level of apprehension about…

Empirical studies are reviewed of sex bias and psychometric bias in aptitude and achievement tests. It is concluded that: (1) of four studies of sex bias, all found that the language used in the tests favored males, but, at the elementary-secondary level, sex bias has been decreasing; (2) of 15 analyses of psychometric bias, all found an…

This guide begins with a series of questions and answers which introduce Pennsylvania's Educational Quality Assessment (EQA) Inventory as a 188-to 190-item multiple choice test for fifth, eighth, and eleventh grades. Items are selected from a 400-item bank using matrix sampling procedures. Test results are analyzed at the school level; no…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 30 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: use of short and long passages in informal reading inventories, components in decoding spelling patterns, the psycholinguistic analysis of oral reading miscues and…

FOUR INSTRUMENTS WERE DEVELOPED AND STANDARDIZED TO MEASURE EARLY EXPERIENCE, CURRENT BEHAVIOR, TREATMENT APPROACHES, AND PROGNOSIS OF EMOTIONALLY DISTURBED CHILDREN--THE RATING/RANKING SCALE OF CHILD BEHAVIOR (R/R SCALE), THE PARENT PRACTICES INVENTORY (PPI), THE SCALE ON PROCEDURES IN DEALING WITH CHILDREN (PDC), AND THE CHILD HISTORY CODE…