Alternative Approaches to the Assessment of Achievement

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-XVII

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2. Educational Assessment: A Brief History

   • David L. McArthur

   Pages 1-20

3. Toward More Sensible Achievement Measurement: A Retrospective

   • David L. McArthur

   Pages 21-77

4. Analysis of Patterns: The S-P Technique

   • David L. McArthur

   Pages 79-98

5. The Rasch Model for Item Analysis

   • David L. McArthur

   Pages 99-127

6. The Three-Parameter Logistic Model

   • David L. McArthur

   Pages 129-158

7. Measuring Achievement with Latent Structure Models

   • David L. McArthur

   Pages 159-186

8. Generalizability Theory and Achievement Testing

   • David L. McArthur

   Pages 187-231

9. Analysis of Reading Comprehension Data

   • David L. McArthur

   Pages 233-248

10. A Comparison of Models for Measuring Achievement

    • David L. McArthur

    Pages 249-265

11. Back Matter

    Pages 267-268

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Ingrained for many years in the science of educational assessment were a large number of "truths" about how to make sense out of testing results, artful wisdoms that appear to have held away largely by force of habit alone. Practitioners and researchers only occasionally agreed about how tests should be designed, and were even further apart when they came to interpreting test responses by any means other than categorically "right" or "wrong." Even the best innovations were painfully slow to be incorporated into practice. The traditional approach to testing was developed to accomplish only two tasks: to provide ranking of students, or to select relatively small proportions of students for special treatment. In these tasks it was fairly effective, but it is increasingly seen as inadequate for the broader spectrum of issues that educational measurement is now called upon to address. Today the range of questions being asked of educational test data is itself growing by leaps and bounds. Fortunately, to meet this challenge we have available a wide panoply of resource tools for assessment which deserve serious attention. Many of them have exceptionally sOphisticated mathematical foundations, and succeed well where older and less versatile techniques fail dismally. Yet no single new tool can conceivably cover the entire arena.

• Rasch Model
• assessment
• education

• Center for Student Testing, Evaluation and Standards, Graduate School of Education, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA

  David L. McArthur

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