Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This chapter was written by Samuel Ball and originally published as an ETS report in 1979. Ball was one of ETS’s most active program evaluators for 10 years and directed several pacesetting studies, including a large-scale evaluation of the educational effects of Sesame Street. The chapter documents the vigorous program of evaluation research conducted at ETS in the 1960s and 1970s, which helped lay the foundation for this fledgling field. This work developed new viewpoints, techniques, and skills for systematically assessing educational programs and led to the creation of principles for program evaluation that still appear relevant today.

Over the course of its history, ETS has conducted education policy research focused on promoting equal opportunity for all individuals from early childhood through adulthood. This chapter describes a selection of work in:

This chapter is the first of two that present an account of a portion of ETS research conducted in cognitive, personality, and social psychology since the organization’s inception. The topics covered include, in cognitive psychology, the structure of abilities; in personality psychology, response styles and social and emotional intelligence; and in social psychology, prosocial behavior and stereotype threat. Research on motivation is also covered.

This account is the second of two chapters addressing a portion of the ETS research on cognitive, personality, and social psychology conducted since the organization’s inception. The topics covered include, in cognitive psychology, creativity; in personality psychology, cognitive styles and kinesthetic aftereffect; and in social psychology, risk taking.

Developmental psychology was a major area of research at ETS from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. This work was a natural extension of the programs in cognitive, personality, and social psychology that had begun shortly after the organization’s founding in 1947, consistent with Henry Chauncey’s vision of investigating intellectual and personal qualities. This chapter covers research on representational competence; parental influences, migration, and measurement; cognitive, personality, and social development of infants and young children; and cognitive, personality, and social development from infancy to adolescence.

This chapter reviews ETS contributions to validity theory and practice at various levels of generality, including overarching frameworks, more targeted models for issues such as fairness, and particular analytic methodologies (e.g., related to reliability, equating, differential item functioning). The emphasis is on contributions to the theory of validity and, secondarily, on the practice of validation rather than on specific methodologies.

Special preparation for tests has been a relatively contentious issue. The controversy has entailed (a) disagreement over the effectiveness of such preparation, (b) concern over unequal access to it, and (c) worries about its impact on the validity of test scores. This chapter provides a brief history of ETS involvement with and contribution to sorting out the issues associated with special test preparation.

This chapter chronicles ETS contributions related to the use of constructed-response item formats. The use of constructed-response formats in testing dates back to imperial China, where tests were used in the selection of civil servants. In the United States, the multiple-choice format became dominant during the twentieth century. When ETS was founded in 1947, postsecondary admissions testing was largely based on tests consisting of such items. However, from the start, there were two camps at ETS: those staff members who believed that multiple-choice tests were sufficient for assessing “verbal” skills and those members who believed that “direct” forms of assessment requiring written responses were critical. For the use of constructed-response formats to be feasible, several challenges would need to be overcome. Research at ETS was instrumental in overcoming those challenges.

This chapter synthesizes ETS contributions to educational research and policy analysis, psychology, and psychometrics covering seven decades. The synthesis is organized by decade, providing a picture of the persistent, as well as the changing, emphases that characterized ETS research over time.