Our mailbox is bustling this week and even better many of the comments come from dear friends whom I have known for over half a century. In fact, the photo above is from where Mark attended school — the Abigail Adams Schoolhouse — while growing up in Weymouth Massachusetts. We met at Manhattan College in […]
Okay. People. Let’s check out their ability to render valid and reliable judgments. Those who suggest that tests need to go away usually suggest that people can do the judging — teachers, HR generalists or recruiting specialists, admissions counselors. It is rare in my experience to have either a suggestion of the improvements or replacements […]
If this post is shorter today, I swear that it’s not just because two NFL playoff games start shortly. After all, being a New York Jets fan, my season ended sometime in September. It’s because the purpose of this blog and its subset of 31 consecutive January jolts can be served that are at times […]
The word ‘dialogue’ cops 2,380,000 hits on Google all by itself, which indicates to me that people mean a lot of different things when they use the word… Dialogue. One of the purposes of the blog Testing: a Personal History was to attempt to establish a dialogue about testing. My meaning of dialogue, however, tracks […]
Before he disgraced himself by dating and then marrying the adopted daughter of his previous partner, Woody Allen was an artistic hero of mine. I read all of his stories, listened to the recordings of his standup, and stood online to catch one of the first screenings whenever a new film of his opened. No […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]