By using carefully constructed measurement scales that span grades, Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) interim assessments from Northwest Evaluation Association™ (NWEA™) offer educators efficient and very accurate estimates of student achievement status within a subject. Before achievement test scores can be useful to educators, however, they…

While many educators expect the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to be more rigorous than previous state standards, some wonder if the transition to CCSS and to a Common Core aligned MAP test will have an impact on their students' RIT scores or the NWEA norms. MAP assessments use a proprietary scale known as the RIT (Rasch unit) scale to measure…

The FAIR-FS consists of computer-adaptive reading comprehension and oral language screening tasks that provide measures to track growth over time, as well as a Probability of Literacy Success (PLS) linked to grade-level performance (i.e., the 40th percentile) on the reading comprehension subtest of the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT-10) in the…

Because of their global clinical utility, phonemic fluency tests are frequently incorporated into neuropsychological assessment batteries. However, in heterogeneous societies their use is complicated by the lack of careful attention to using letters of equivalent difficulty across languages, and the paucity of norms stratified by relevant…

The Flynn effect is the rise in IQ scores across the last eighty or more years documented in the general distribution of both industrialized and developing nations primarily on tests that require problem solving and non-verbal reasoning. However, whether the effect extends to the right tail (i.e., the top 5% of ability) remains unknown. The…

Because of the Flynn effect, IQ scores rise as a test norm ages but drop on the introduction of a newly revised test norm. The purpose of the current study was to determine the impact of the Flynn effect on learning disability (LD) diagnoses, the most prevalent special education diagnosis in the United States. Using a longitudinal sample of 875…

In the attempt to identify or prevent unfair tests, both quantitative analyses and logical evaluation are often used. For the most part, fairness evaluation is a pragmatic attempt at determining whether procedural or substantive due process has been accorded to either a group of test takers or an individual. In both the individual and comparative…

This research explored the measurement characteristics of two science examinations and the potential to use access arrangements data to investigate how students requiring reading support are affected by features of exam questions. For two science examinations, traditional and Rasch analyses provided estimates of difficulty and information on item…

The question regarding the appropriateness of the use of tests of intelligence and cognitive abilities developed in the United States to assess people from other countries was renewed in the debate between Suen and Greenspan (2008) and Sanchez-Escobedo and Hollingworth (2009). This controversy arose from challenges in the translation, adaptation,…

Assessing a high school's effectiveness is not straightforward. Comparing a school's standardized test scores to those of other schools is one approach to measuring effectiveness, but a major objection to this method is that students' test scores tend to be related to students' "socioeconomic" status--family household income, for…

The No Child Left Behind Act imposes sanctions on schools if the fraction of students demonstrating proficiency on a high-stakes test falls below a statewide pass rate. While the motivation behind this system is improved public school performance, it also provides incentives for schools to focus educational resources on the marginal student rather…

Psychometric practice does not always converge with the advances of psychometric theory. In order to investigate this gap, the authors focus on the 10 most used psychological tests in Europe, as identified by recent surveys. The article analyzes test manuals published in 6 different European countries for these 10 most used tests. A total of 32…

School reform efforts across the US have focused on creating systems in which all students are expected to achieve to high standards. To ensure that students reach those standards and to document what students know and can do, schools collect assessment information on students' academic achievement. More information is needed, however, to find out…