The primary purpose of this article is to describe the development and utility of the Social Interaction Practices for the Preschool Years (SIPPY) questionnaire. The SIPPY is a tool designed to assess teachers' judgments of the acceptability and feasibility, as well as their current use, of literature-supported strategies for promoting the…

Student perceptions of classroom environment can provide useful criteria for evaluating educational alternatives. The My Class Inventory (MCI) was used with 588 3rd- to 5th-grade students in Texas in evaluating the effectiveness of instruction using a textbook, science kits, or a combination of both. Various analyses attested to the factorial…

While well-established attachment measures have been developed for infancy, early childhood, and adulthood, a "measurement gap" has been identified in middle childhood, where behavioral or representational measures are not yet sufficiently robust. This article documents the development of a new measure--the Child Attachment Interview…

This study examined the psychometric characteristics of two parenting measures: the Parent Behavior Importance Questionnaire (PBIQ) and Parent Behavior Frequency Questionnaire (PBFQ). Both research questionnaires are based on the parent development theory (PDT) and offer parent as well as non-parent respondents the opportunity to rate 38 parenting…

This study addresses the development of a teacher questionnaire to assess the social participation of pupils with special needs in regular primary schools and is divided into 2 parts. In the 1st part, the construction of the questionnaire is described. The questionnaire consists of 30 statements related to 4 key themes of social participation: …

Providing fair assessment with timely feedback for students is a difficult task with science laboratory classes containing large numbers of students. Throughout our Faculty, such classes are assessed by short-answer questions (SAQs) centred on principles encountered in the laboratory. We have shown recently that computer-assisted assessment (CAA)…

The Tutotest is one of the few structured instruments developed for the assessment of students' learning skills in a problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum. This study was designed to validate the Tutotest in a hybrid PBL curriculum. Forty-four tutors completed 370 evaluations on second to fourth year medical students at the end of the first…

Research Findings: Few rating scales measure social competence in very young Spanish or Catalan children. We aimed to analyze the psychometric characteristics of the California Preschool Social Competence Scale (CPSCS) when applied to a Spanish- and Catalan-speaking population. Children were rated by their respective teachers within 6 months…

Evaluation research pertaining to the development of assessment instruments that fully capture the facets of empowerment prevention perspectives among youth are sparse. With funding from the American Legacy Foundation, the University of New Mexico Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, in partnership with the New Mexico State…

In this paper, formulas for computing the weights that maximize the reliability of a test with multiple parts are derived using a congeneric model. A direct derivation for the three-part test and case and a two-step derivation for the n-part case are presented, and results for these two approaches are shown to be consistent for the three-part…

Noting that the amount of reading students do is related to their reading achievement, this booklet presents an instrument designed to measure the amount and breadth of students' reading in and out of school. The first part of the booklet discusses the Reading Activity Inventory (RAI) and how it differs from other reading activity measures, uses…

Evaluated with 12 children (9- to 25-months-old) were the efficacy and reliability of auditory stimulus-response control training and assessment procedures. (Author/LS)

This study determined internal consistency and test-retest reliability coefficients for the Willoughby Personality Schedule, currently used as an outcome measure in research and in clinical practice. The Hoyt analysis of variance yielded an internal consistency reliability coefficient of .90 on the first testing. The test-retest reliability…

Research indicates that a special version of the cloze procedure is a reliable test of reading comprehension. (RB)

Contrary to common belief, reliability estimates of number-right multiple-choice tests are not inflated by speededness. Because examinees guess on questions when they run out of time, the responses to these questions show less consistency with the responses of other questions, and the reliability of the test will be decreased. The surprising…