Glossary of Assessment Terms

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Academic Aptitude Test

An aptitude test predicts achievement in academic pursuits. Ideally, in constructing this type of test, the developer tries to minimize the effect of exposure to specific materials or courses of study on the examinee's score.

Achievement Test

An assessment that measures a student's acquired knowledge and skills in one or more common content areas (for example, reading, mathematics, or language).

Adult Accountability Test

An assessment intended primarily for individuals 18 years old or older who are no longer attending elementary or secondary school.

Alternative Assessment

An assessment that differs from traditional achievement tests. For example, an alternative assessment may require a student to generate or produce responses or products rather than answer only selected-response items. This type of assessment may include constructed-response activities, essays, portfolios, interviews, teacher observations, work samples, and/or group projects.

Analytic Scoring

A scoring procedure in which a student's work is evaluated for selected traits or dimensions, with each dimension receiving a separate score.

Aptitude Test

A test consisting of items selected and standardized so that the test predicts a person's future performance on tasks not obviously similar to those in the test. Aptitude tests may or may not differ in content from achievement tests, but they do differ in purpose. Aptitude tests consist of items that predict future learning or performance; achievement tests consist of items that sample the adequacy of past learning.

Authentic Assessment

An assessment that measures a student's performance on tasks and situations that occur in real life. This type of assessment is closely aligned with, and models, what students do in the classroom.

Battery

A test battery is a set of several tests designed to be administered as a unit. Individual subject-area tests measure different areas of content and may be scored separately; scores from the subtests may also be combined into a single score.

Bias

A situation that occurs in testing when items systematically measure differently for different ethnic, gender, or age groups. Test developers reduce bias by analyzing item data separately for each group, then identifying and discarding items that appear to be biased.

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Ceiling

The upper limit of performance that can be measured effectively by a test. Individuals are said to have reached the ceiling of a test when they perform at the top of the range in which the test can make reliable discriminations. If an individual or group scores at the ceiling of a test, the next higher level of the test should be administered, if available.

Checklist

An assessment that is based on the examiner observing an individual or group and indicating whether or not the assessed behavior is demonstrated.

Composite Score

A single score used to express the combination, by averaging or summation, of the scores on several different tests.

Comprehensive Equal-Interval Scale

See "Equal-Interval Scale".

Constructed-Response Item

An assessment unit with directions, a question, or a problem that elicits a written, pictorial, or graphic response from a student. Sometimes called an "open-ended" item.

Content Validity

Content validity indicates the extent to which the content of the test samples the subject matter or situation about which conclusions are to be drawn. Methods used in determining content validity are textbook analysis, description of the universe of items, adequacy of the sample, representativeness of the test content, inter-correlations of subtest scores, and opinions of a jury of experts.

Conversion Tables

Tables used to convert a student's test scores from scale score units to grade equivalents, percentile ranks, and stanines.

Criterion

A standard or judgment used as a basis for quantitative and qualitative comparison; that variable to which a test is compared to constitute a measure of the test's validity. For example, grade-point average and attainment of curricular objectives are often used as criteria for judging the validity of an academic aptitude test.

Criterion-Referenced Test

A test in which every item is directly identified with an explicitly stated educational behavioral objective. The test is designed to determine which of these objectives have been mastered by the examinee.

Culture-Fair Test

A test devised to exclude specific cultural stimuli so that persons from a particular culture will not be penalized or rewarded