The educational reform movement has brought a mandate to test prospective teachers from training entry through exit and certification. Concentrating upon recent literature, this report explores current trends and policies in teacher testing. A review of what tests measure and how tests are being used is included. The negative impact of testing on…

In 1979, humanities faculty at Reading Area Community College introduced the writing sample as the means of placing entering freshmen into appropriate writing classes. In response to expressed concern about the objectivity and validity of the writing sample approach, the humanities faculty engaged in a 6-year effort to adjust the writing sample…

Techniques derived from item response theory are useful for estimating the reliability of test classification above and below the cutting score. Test developers can construct a test whose information is peaked in the region of the cutting score; users can select a test which provides the most information in this region. The Cut-Score…

Self-report measures of perceived communication competence used properly can help build understanding of communication behavior, but used as indications of communication performance can only retard such efforts. Not all uses of such instruments are either legitimate or appropriate--for example, using self-report measures to determine an…

The construct validity of responses to the Tennessee Self Concept Scale (TSCS) was evaluated in two sets of analyses. First, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and an analysis of variance model adapted from multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) research, were used to examine the internal structure of the TSCS responses. Second, MTMM analyses…

Research identified the dimensions (factor structure) of an instrument designed to measure perceptions about adult agricultural education using factor analysis. Objectives were to factor analyze the items comprising the instrument, describe the factors identified, and describe the reliability of the subsets of items that comprise the identified…

The paper examines issues, philosophy and guidelines for psychological assessment of the disabled. Focused on are: (1) adjustments in testing procedures and (2) applicability of standard norms with commonly used psychological test instruments for the assessment of ability, interest, and personality. The importance of accurate assessment for…

One form of adaptive testing involves a two-stage procedure. The first stage is the administration of a routing test. From this first test, an estimate of an examinee's ability is obtained. On the basis of this ability estimate, a second test focused on a given ability level is administered. The purpose of this study was to compare the efficiency…

Self-Knowledge Development Theory (SKDT) by Weinstein and A. Alschuler (1985) is a structural developmental theory positing four stages in the development of self-knowledge. The Experience Recall Test-2 (ERT2) is described, which is the most recent instrument developed for assessing the SKDT. Self-knowledge is defined as the ability to describe…

A heuristic for solving large-scale zero-one programming problems is provided. The heuristic is based on the modifications made by H. Crowder et al. (1983) to the standard branch-and-bound strategy. First, the initialization is modified. The modification is only useful if the objective function values for the continuous and the zero-one…

This study reports the results of a pilot study of the relationship between teachers and students. The study used a newly developed measure: The Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (STRS). In a sample of 72 kindergarten children, the STRS was found to have three factors: Secure, Change, and Insecure. The total scale and the subscales based on these…

Job satisfaction is highly researched in industrial and organizational psychology, and the Job Descriptive Index (JDI) is often used to measure job satisfaction. The JDI has been shown to have significant convergent and discriminant validities, good internal consistency and stability, and has been related to various personal and job factors. While…

Stability of performance on the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC) and the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale: Fourth Edition (S-B:4) over a 1-year interval was examined with a sample of 28 nonhandicapped preschoolers. Each child was administered both tests in counterbalanced order and retested in 1 year with either the K-ABC or the…

In preparation for adding an essay test to the General Educational Development (GED) test, the GED Testing Service undertook a series of studies to establish (1) whether acceptable reading reliabilities were attainable in decentralized holistic scoring sessions often involving no more than a dozen papers; (2) whether essay readers in a variety of…

The assessment of the changes in knowledge about aging is essential to the development of aging courses and curricula. The present instrument was designed to reliably and validly measure various areas of information about aging. An item pool was gathered by examining texts and printed materials and consulting with persons specializing in…