ADVISORY DOCUMENTS

Professional Resources Services publishes a series of advisory documents for those in the education, psychology and allied helping professions. It is anticipated that these documents will serve as a valuable resource for people selecting assessment instruments. The following index leads to these documents.

Insightful Assessment through Item Response Modelling

A PDF file reproducing an authoritative article on assessment from the Australian Journal of Learning Disabilities, Vol 6. No2, June 2001.

Australian Mathematics Tests

Advice on PRS's Australian versions of mathematics tests.

There Is No Failure, Only Feedback.

Paper presented to the MAV conference in 1999 on use of the Item Response Model in teaching mathematics.

Testing for Teaching I

... both major components of professionally published instruments are ... - diagnostic or detailed curriculum achievement information and norm referenced information so that we can relate the groups or individuals in our care to varying contexts. This is a key to a major difference between professionally published tests and teacher or school based tests.

Testing for Teaching II

A paper presented to the AARE conference in 1997.

"Monbulk Primary School has sought to validate school achievements by use of external indicators obtained from published tests selected to match the school's stated goals. This process has provided regular feedback to staff and the school community, identifying areas needing attention and confirming the progress being made. The school sought to provide published test information to teachers in a format that was curriculum-standards-based to expose areas needing attention and to present this information so that individual progress could be mapped in curriculum terms on a routine basis. This section of this paper provides details of the establishment of the Testing for Teaching program at Monbulk Primary School."

Extension of Item Response Modelling Data for Mathematics Tests

A paper presented at the AARE Conference Fremantle 2001

Assessment strategies for use by teachers need to provide useful information so that the learning by their students can be enhanced. Currently there are two main types of published tests available for teacher use. Traditional tests generally have been developed with classical item analysis. Modern tests generally have been developed with variants of item response modelling.