Educational Measurement As A Field Is About As Old As Writing Assessment Itself

By Author: Park
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As we have noted, educational measurement as a field is about as old as writing assessment itself. Writing assessment began in the late nineteenth century and culminated with the establishment of CEEB at the turn of the twentieth century. Educational measurement began in the late nineteenth century with studies on human physical and mental Thomas Sabo Jewellery properties exemplified by Wundt's perceptual laboratory in Leipzig, which produced physical data related to human behavior: for example, how long it took a person to react to physical stimuli, or how the eye moved when reading. At the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, laws were passed mandating that all children attend school for a period of time; this resulted in a flurry of activity in mental testing. Existing schools were challenged with a population of students they did not know how to teach:

One consequence of the new laws in the United States was to bring into the schools for the first time large numbers of children whose parents did not have an education or were not native English speakers. The ...
... new waves of pupils were exposed to curricula and academic standards that had been developed for a more select group of students, so the rate of failure rose dramatically, sometimes reaching 50%. (Thorn-dike 4) Along with mandatory universal education, the entry of the United States into World War I less than two decades later created a need for testing the millions of men needed to fight the war. These uses for an effective form of classification in the schools and military created a great deal of energy and activity that led to the creation of the field and industry of intelligence testing and test development.

From the beginnings of both educational and psychological measurement in general and writing assessment in particular, reliability or consistency has been seen as a key issue. In the late 1890s, Charles Spearman Thomas Sabo Charms devised the mathematical formula for correlations. This formula was important because it allowed test developers to draft various forms of the same test and to make sure that test results were mathematically similar. As well, the statistical formula for correlations helped researchers and test developers know what measures produced similar results. The statistical formula for correlations was also important in writing assessment because it helped to document in early studies, like that reported on by Daniel Starch and Edward Elliott in 1912 that teachers could not agree on grades for the same papers.

During World War I, Carl Brigham, Robert Yerkes, Louis Terman, and others worked on testing and classified millions of soldiers for the U.S. armed forces. The development of the Army Alpha test and its database of millions of test scores spawned the publication of thirteen other examinations in the 1920s and 1930s, including the SAT (Wasser-man and Tulsky). Testers became more adept at understanding and applying the technologies that could test the greatest numbers in the shortest time for the least expense (Madhaus). As we now all understand in the year 2010, the standardized test has become the tool not only for intelligence testing, but also for a wide range of achievement and aptitude tests used to make high-stakes decisions about students, teachers, schools, curricula, and institutions.