Adapting Adaptive Testing: Using the MicroCAT Testing System in a Local School District

What is the rationale for adapting an existing testing system instead of developing your own? What are the limitations of MicroCAT? What has to be modified in order to meet local needs and to realize the potential of adaptive testing in the context of an existing testing system?     

Measuring Search Engine Quality

The effectiveness of twenty public search engines is evaluated using TREC-inspired methods and a set of 54 queries taken from real Web search logs. The World Wide Web is taken as the test collection and a combination of crawler and text retrieval system is evaluated. The engines are compared on a range of measures derivable from binary relevance judgments of the first seven live results returned. Statistical testing reveals a significant difference between engines and high intercorrelations between measures. Surprisingly, given the dynamic nature of the Web and the time elapsed, there is also a high correlation between results of this study and a previous study by Gordon and Pathak. For nearly all engines, there is a gradual decline in precision at increasing cutoff after some initial fluctuation. Performance of the engines as a group is found to be inferior to the group of participants in the TREC-8 Large Web task, although the best engines approach the median of those systems. Shortcomings of current Web search evaluation methodology are identified and recommendations are made for future improvements. In particular, the present study and its predecessors deal with queries which are assumed to derive from a need to find a selection of documents relevant to a topic. By contrast, real Web search reflects a range of other information need types which require different judging and different measures.     

Graduate Programs That Prepare Educational Measurement Specialists

What are typical requirements in graduate measurement programs? How d o programs in measurement and research methods differ?     

论城市休闲健身运动的可持续发展

物质生活水平提高后,城市居民的精神生活及健康需求成为休闲健身运动可持续发展的动力;政府和媒介的宣传,有力地促进了全民休闲健身意识的提高;持续稳定的经济发展,给城市休闲健身运动的快速发展奠定了基石。坚持休闲健身运动多元化、趣味化、娱乐化,加速培养休闲健身运动产业的经营、管理以及中介人才是实现我国休闲健身运动健康、快速、可持续发展的重要途径。