Reliability, validity, and all that jazz

Abstract

Summary In this article my purpose has not been to indicate what kinds of things can and can't be assessed appropriately with tests. Rather, I have tried to illuminate how the key ideas of reliability and validity are used by test developers and what this means in practice — not least in terms of the decisions that are made about individual students on the basis of their test results. As I have stressed throughout this article, these limitations are not the fault of test developers. However inconvenient these limitations are for proponents of school testing, they are inherent in the nature of tests of academic achievement, and are as real as rocks. All users of the results of educational tests must understand what a limited technology this is.

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