A study examined the usefulness of information secured from eight students displaying substantially more problem behaviors in one classroom (high-risk) than another, and 16 teachers. Students were able to provide reliable information in the functional assessment interview. Moderate to high agreement was obtained between students and teachers in…

The International E-Mail Directory of Health Educators (http://www.hedir.siu.edu), or HEDIR, is an electronic mailing list specifically developed to facilitate communication among health education professionals worldwide. The study objectives were to characterize the nature of HEDIR messages and assess how well HEDIR is meeting members'…

Purpose: This study examined whether any of a series of segmental and whole-word measures of articulatory competence captured more of the variance in impressionistic ratings of severity of involvement in speech delay. It also examined whether knowing the age of the child affected severity ratings. Method: Ten very experienced speech-language…

The Assessment of Preterm Infants' Behavior (APIB) is a newborn neurobehavioral assessment appropriate for preterm, at risk, and full-term newborns, from birth to 1 month after expected due date. The APIB is based in ethological--evolutionary thought and focuses on the assessment of mutually interacting behavioral subsystems in simultaneous…

Research on the utility of feedback to raters in the form of performance reports has produced mixed findings (Lunt, Morton, & Wigglesworth, 1994; Wigglesworth, 1993) and has thus far been trialled only in oral assessment contexts. This article reports on a study investigating raters' attitudes and responsiveness to feedback on their ratings of…

This methodological investigation examines the accuracy of narrative-based scaled ratings covering several post high school years. Guided narratives by young adults described developmentally relevant behaviour and context for each month between ages 17 and the mid-20s. "Prospective" narratives covered shorter time periods in three interviews…

Practicing clinicians frequently offer judgments about aspects of swallowing physiology rather than performing actual measurements. Little is known about the accuracy of those judgments. The purpose of this preliminary study was to explore agreement of clinicians' judgments of pharyngeal swallow response time (PSRT) with temporal measurements of…

Standardized portfolios are being used by teachers and teacher candidates to demonstrate subject matter knowledge for certification or to be considered highly qualified; however, the psychometric adequacy of data used for this purpose has not been evaluated. In the current study, we examined the interscorer reliability, concurrent, predictive, and…

Deaf Education Teacher Preparation Programs must prepare teachers to staff an increasing number of oral programs. A survey was conducted to determine which competencies administrators of deaf education programs rate as important for teachers in oral programs and to compare ratings of these competencies by oral school administrators to ratings made…

As constructed-response items become an integral part of educational assessments, setting student performance standards on constructed-response items has become an important issue. Two standard-setting methods, one used for setting standards on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading in grade 8 and the other used to set…

Preliminary data was gathered to guide subsequent research that will shape training procedures and scoring practice for performance assessment activities that integrate multiple content areas. Content area integration is a key feature of many of the tasks in the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP), a large-scale assessment of…

A study was conducted to provide information for setting two separate standards, the accuracy score and the documentation score, for the Praxis III: Classroom Performance Assessment (Praxis III). Praxis III is intended for making instructional and licensing decisions about beginning teachers. This standard-setting study was a person-judgment…

This study was undertaken to test the hypothesis that items of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) containing reference to American people, places, customs, etc., tend to favor examinees who have spent some time living in the United States. Two samples of examinees were drawn from the March 1987 TOEFL administration, one tested in…

The Educational Testing Service is developing a new generation of teacher assessments--the Praxis Series: Professional Assessments for Beginning Teachers. The assessment series consists of three components. An academic skills component will assess the candidate's basic academic and enabling skills. Subject assessments will test the candidate's…

The design, administration, scoring, and results of the 1993 New York State Correctional Captain Examination are described. The examination was administered to 405 candidates. As in previous Sergeant and Lieutenant examinations, candidates also completed latent image written simulation problems and open/closed book multiple choice test components.…