Behavioral scientists have struggled with units of measurement for as long as they have struggled with measurement itself. Psychology's sole attempt at an explicit unit of measurement--the Lexile Framework for Reading (Stenner, Burdick, Sanford, & Burdick, 2006)--has been and continues to be ignored by the psychometric "cognoscenti." A recent…

Black, Wilson, and Yao (this issue) commendably attempt to put descriptive theory at the center of pedagogy, assessment, and curriculum. The thrust of their article is that only through theories of learning will student progression be properly understood. Casting a critical eye over the faddish distinction between "formative" and "summative"…

Few would argue that psychology has been as successful as the natural sciences in constructing measurement systems, yet this has not tempered the near universal claim of psychological measurement. As Haig and Denny Borsboom note, the sustained nature of conceptual attacks from a small group of quantitative psychologists suggests a deep-seated…