A new, Holland-based Interest Inventory is proposed, intended to facilitate the transition from secondary to tertiary education. Specific interest items were designed to grasp activities that are prevalent during tertiary studies, including an Academic-track-scale to assist in the choice between academic and vocational-oriented programs. Interest…

Fifty years ago, Robert Glaser introduced the concept of criterion-referenced measurement in an article in American Psychologist. Its early proponents predicted that this measurement strategy would revolutionize education. But has it lived up to its promise? W. James Popham explores this question by looking at the history of criterion-referenced…

Standards-based grading (SBG) tightly links student assessment to course learning objectives, providing students with meaningful feedback. A well-designed SBG system should ease first-year engineering (FYE) students' transition to tertiary education by setting clear expectations and enabling self-monitoring of learning progress. However, when…

This article summarizes some of the technical issues that add to the complexity of language testing. It focuses in particular on the criterion-referenced nature of the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines-Speaking; and it proposes a criterion-referenced interpretation of the ACTFL guidelines for reading and listening. It then demonstrates how using…

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the extent to which special education teachers experience anxiety administering the different versions of the Criterion Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) and Criterion Referenced Competency Test-Modified (CRCT-M). This human service profession (education) was selected because there is very little literature…

Students with and without learning disabilities often struggle to learn a foreign language (FL). Teachers could benefit from a measure designed to screen and identify students at risk for FL learning difficulties. In this study, we examined the reliability and validity of scores from four curriculum-based measures (CBM) as potential indicators of…

The purpose of this quantitative retrospective quasi-experimental study was to determine if there was a statistically significant difference between sixth, seventh, and eighth grade special education students receiving multiple instructional strategies and sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students receiving traditional instructional strategies.…

In this experiment, we contrasted two instructions in which the focus of summary writing was varied. We predicted that students would better understand a scientific text when they learn to focus their summaries on the referential content rather than on the hierarchical structure of the text. In a 2 × 2 factorial experiment, 85 Grade-10 students…

The purpose of this study is to reveal whether or not the social skills teaching program based on the direct instruction approach is effective on the ability of mentally retarded students in regular classroom settings to gain social skills such as apologizing, asking for help and finishing a task on time, and to generalize these abilities. This…

We used meta-analysis to examine the criterion validity of four scoring procedures used in curriculum-based measurement of written language. A total of 22 articles representing 21 studies (N = 21) met the inclusion criteria. Results indicated that two scoring procedures, correct word sequences and correct minus incorrect sequences, have acceptable…

This paper discusses the use and impact of formative feedback and scaffolding to develop outcomes for complex problem solving in a required first-year course in engineering design and practice at a medium-sized research-intensive Canadian university. In 2010, the course began to use team-based, complex, open-ended contextualised problems to…

The research informing this paper set out to investigate the qualitative experiences of students, supervisors and tutors involved in a summative collaborative assessment of placement learning on an undergraduate professional qualifying programme in the UK. Analysis of data gathered through semi-structured interviews provides valuable insights into…

Positive Behavior Intervention Support (PBIS) has been used in many schools as an effective behavior management system to improve the behavior of students in classrooms, which impacts their academic performance. This quantitative, retrospective, one-group pretest posttest study was to determine the impact of PBIS on students' academic and behavior…

This manuscript describes two empirical studies of alternative scoring procedures used with curriculum-based measurement in writing (CBM-W). Study 1 explored the technical adequacy of a trait-based rubric in first grade. Study 2 explored the technical adequacy of a trait-based rubric, production-dependent, and production-independent scores in…

The goal of the current study is to examine the impact of students' social economic status, ethnicity, and discipline infractions on their standardized test scores in Indiana, the USA. Data from this study extracted from Indiana Department of Education. ISTEP is a criterion-referenced standardized test. It consists of items that assess a student's…