Over seven decades, my compulsion to read has benefited me enormously. The most recent example is that in taking on a book on Russian books and the people who read them by Elif Batuman entitled The Possessed. The book has nothing to do with but I’m trying to do and doesn’t fit my usual interests, […]
The Complete Posts
The Way To Bet or Predictive Validity Is Imperfect Too!
Yesterday’s post continued the theme of the lack of understanding of validity in both the design of tests at all levels and interpretation of their scores. In service of that argument, I quoted from a chapter by Emily Shaw in the book Measuring Success edited by Jack Buckley, Lynn Letukas, and Ben Wildavsky: “Decades of […]
Mailbox Monday: Our Faithful Correspondents Communicate
Double digits now! This is the tenth post of the thirty-one promised January Jolts for Testing: A Personal History. For new readers — and if LinkedIn stats are valid — we have many of those — here is an explanation for why this blog exists: Having been thrust accidentally into the world of testing 20 […]
Validation Is Not Just for Parking Tickets
Is it overkill to devote the daily January jolt of this blog to validity yet again? No! Why do we take a test in the first place? So that we can make a claim about ourselves or others feel comfortable making a claim about us whether it is that we have learned something, can perform […]
Validity is an Imperfect Measurement
Some things bear repeating like this line from a November post on tbhis blog: “Validity is the “cardinal virtue in assessment” noted Bob and two other former colleagues Linda Steinberg, & Russell Almond, in 2003. ” There are some disagreements about validity among psychometricians; some think that the test should be tested for validity, not just its score. Harvey Goldstein articulates the protest well […]
When a bad test was good for… me
In yesterday’s post, I asked readers (of whom I am now delighted to say number in the hundreds and not the dozens) whether any of you had ever been involved with a test either as the person giving it or the person taking it where you thought that its score derived from test might not be valid. Still […]
Aiming for Validity
My gratitude swells for the generosity of Marianne Talbot who has commented on each of the January jolt posts thus far. But in an echo of my last post, it’s not just the quantity of her comments but the quality that matters as she offers insights and resources. In a recent comment, Marianne offered this […]
Nobody’s Perfect
I hope that every reader knows the movie Some Like It Hot. But just in case you missed that 1959 classic in which for variety of reasons, here’s a relevant plot twist. Jack Lemmon’s character of Jerry not only has to dress up as a female member of an ‘all girl band’, but also in […]
True Stories, Realities, and Illusions
Over the Christmas week as is our custom, my wife, Marjorie, and I watched several favorite movies. The winner for most viewed film during our more than four decades together has to be The Philadelphia Story even though the story itself contains elements that make us just a little bit more uncomfortable as each year […]
The failure to reconcile social learning with competitive testing schemes
Hard to believe that seven years have passed since Alina Von Davier and I with the expert assistance of Sue Borchardt created this brief animated video on collaborative assessment as part of the Pulling to the Edge series to accelerate innovation in educational measurement. Alina offers some glittering insights in this short film such as “We (educational measurement scientists) measure very very well what we […]