R&L Education
Pages: 226
Trim: 6½ x 9
978-1-61048-012-3 • Paperback • January 2011 • $62.00 • (£48.00)
978-1-61048-013-0 • eBook • January 2011 • $58.50 • (£45.00)
Nora Vivian Odendahl received a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University and worked as a test developer at Educational Testing Service for sixteen years. She specialized in writing assessment, including test design, essay scoring, and applications of technology.
Chapter 1 I. The Origins of Educational Measurement: A Quest to Quantify
Chapter 2 II. In the Modern Era: A Tool for Classroom and Society
Chapter 3 III. Educational Assessment and National Values
Chapter 4 IV. Perspectives and Directives
Chapter 5 V. Validity
Chapter 6 VI. Reliability
Chapter 7 VII. Fairness and Accessibility
Chapter 8 VIII. The Meanings and Uses of Scores
In a time when the nation is facing the complexities of participatory democracy at every turn, Testwise: Understanding Educational Assessment is a most welcome touchstone. In her focus on historical and cultural contexts as they reveal the origin and development of assessment principles, Nora Vivian Odendahl has given us a stunning volume. Operating with an insider's knowledge of test development, Dr. Odendahl takes us from civil service examinations used during the Han dynasty in China to contemporary theories of cognition used to map the mind. Always and everywhere, she keeping readers firmly grounded in enduring educational questions: tensions between enforcing accountability and promoting opportunity; the requirements of large-scale testing versus the needs of individual students; and the demands of learning as they intersect with promise of educational equality. A more timely and valuable book cannot be imagined, and we are fortunate that Dr. Odendahl has given us a way to think critically about the roles of testing in our society.
— Norbert Elliot, New Jersey Institute of Technology, author of On a Scale: A Social History of Writing Assessment in America