An Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is an assessment approach employed in medical education, in which residents rotate through multiple stations of standardized clinical tasks to evaluate their clinical competence. Because items used to evaluate residents' performance in each OSCE station are linked to the same task and are rated…

This paper provides formulas for expected true-score measures and reliability of binary items as a function of their Rasch difficulty parameters when the trait distribution is normal or logistic. With the proposed formula, one can evaluate the theoretical values of classical reliability indexes for norm-referenced and criterion-referenced…

This Digest presents a discussion of the assumptions of multiple regression that is tailored to the practicing researcher. The focus is on the assumptions of multiple regression that are not robust to violation, and that researchers can deal with if violated. Assumptions of normality, linearity, reliability of measurement, and homoscedasticity are…

This Digest, intended as an instructional aid for beginning research students and a refresher for researchers in the field, identifies key factors that play a critical role in determining the credibility that should be given to a specific research study. The needs for empirical research, randomization and control, and significance testing are…

This manual presents five learning styles instruments and presents data related to validity and reliability and descriptive statistics. The manual also discusses the implications for learning presented by each of these learning models. For purposes of this discussion, "learning style,""cognitive style," and "personal style" are used synonymously.…

Unfortunately, researchers do not usually have measurement instruments that provide perfectly reliable scores. Therefore, the researcher may want to account for the level of unreliability by appropriately increasing the sample size. For example, the results of a pilot study may indicate that a particular instrument is not as reliable with a given…

The tendency for some survey respondents to be unreasonably agreeable on attitude measures with an agree-disagree format is typically termed acquiescence, or acquiescent responding (AR). This paper suggests an alternative operational definition of AR plus a statistical test for identifying AR subjects. If positively and negatively phrased items…

This study focused on the issue of measurement reliability and its attenuation on correlation between two composites and two seemingly different approaches for correcting the attenuation. As expected, Monte Carlo simulation results show that correlation coefficients uncorrected for measurement error are systematically biased downward. For the data…

A listing of the program and a program description may be obtained by writing the author at the Department of Measurement and Statistics, College of Education, University of Maryland. (Author/MB)

It was hypothesized that one could predict the reliability of the shortened WAIS on the basis of the Spearman Brown formula, and that in testing, as in other fields, you get what you pay for. Results confirmed these hypotheses; a short form is not an adequate substitute for the full WAIS. (Author)

Presents a check list to be used when developing evaluation devices and as a final audit after one is prepared. (SB)

The results of this investigation demonstrate the reliability of ratings of accurate empathy and nonpossessive warmth during psychotherapeutic intervention with children. (Author)