An NCME Instructional Module on Population Invariance in Linking and Equating

A goal for any linking or equating of two or more tests is that the linking function be invariant to the population used in conducting the linking or equating. Violations of population invariance in linking and equating jeopardize the fairness and validity of test scores, and pose particular problems for test‐based accountability programs that require schools, districts, and states to report annual progress on academic indicators disaggregated by demographic group membership. This instructional module provides a comprehensive overview of population invariance in linking and equating and the relevant methodology developed for evaluating violations of invariance. A numeric example is used to illustrate the comparative properties of available methods, and important considerations for evaluating population invariance in linking and equating are presented.     

Abstracts

The early photographs of Canadian mountaineering are a unique genre of historical evidence that serve two functions: (1) they provide pictorial representations of the mountain scenery that supplement literary representations; (2) they are also an artifact of a kinetic event, the act of photographing. This paper considers journals, monographs and photographs from British and Canadian mountaineers. However, the specific focus is on the production and consumption of mountaineering photographs produced in the Canadian Rocky and Selkirk mountains between 1880 and 1920. While mountaineers made pioneering climbs in the Rocky and Selkirk ranges, their desire to reproduce the event brought additional meaning to the experience. Portable cameras and the event of photographing served this desire. As historical evidence, photographs are not merely reproductions of what they saw. They are extensions of what they desired to see as well as extensions of what they desired to feel. Photographs reveal a sensibility that is not evident in the written discourse. Through their cameras they cultivated a new and non-traditional way experiencing their surroundings and their bodies. Different ways of using the camera enabled this generation of mountaineer-sportsmen to constitute themselves as subjects of modernism. This paper demonstrates how ideas about modernist aesthetics provide an interesting and provocative analytical framework for the history of sport.     

Prologue: extending study of the visual in the history of sport

This paper highlights the value of images and materiality associated with sport in the past, and explores the range of sociocultural practices associated with them. It provides a critique of the neglect of such sources by many historians and notes that interest is now substantially growing in visuality and visual material. It emphasises the huge breadth and depth of sports-related evidence that can now be accessed, from stamps to stadiums and from posters to sports paraphernalia. It then examines the multiplicity of methodologies that can potentially be used to exploit the visual, its sites of production and sites of reception and seeing.     

Projecting the visual: British newsreels,soccer and popular culture 1918–39

Between the wars soccer was the leading national sport in Britain. But far more watched the brief depictions of ‘celluloid’ soccer on the newsreels in the cinema than ever watched football on the pitch. Newsreels were a central cultural feature, yet their broader social, historical and ideological significance has been overlooked by both sports and media historians. This study draws on an extensive body of surviving newsreel material. It begins by exploring the complex nature of the inter-war cinema audiences, their responses to sporting newsreels and the cultural competencies they brought to their watching. Examination of newsreel content reveals the changing nature and highly varied coverage of professional and amateur soccer over the period, including significant attention devoted to women's soccer even after its banning from English Football Association grounds in 1921. The day to day practices of newsreel soccer coverage provide fascinating insights into the British sporting values and identities, contained, encouraged or prevented by its representations, codes and conventions. Soccer newsreels produced by the leading companies, while largely conservative in tone, were also highly ideologically charged. Through the ways in which they addressed notions of class, gender, politics, region and identity they had a major cultural impact on broader British society.