Notes
1. Other shortcomings in the content standards are:
arbitrariness, vagueness, enforcement of a particular pedagogy, and low
content in K- 3 where the greatest opportunity for equity exists. On
the plus side, the very openness of content standards makes them
subject to improvement through experience and democratic debate. For
all their flaws, they are far better for equity and quality than
statewide skills-standards with high-stakes tests that encourage
wasting huge amounts of school time in practicing narrow test-taking
activities at the expense of education.
2. The intercorrelation of reading tests with each other
form part of the technical literature accompanying the tests. Different
tests published by a large company are often "equated" to the other
reading tests or test components sold by the company. Researchers have
found strong intercorrelations between reading scores on the Armed
Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (asvab) and the Armed Forces
Qualification Test (afqt) on the one side and the various standardized
reading tests such as Gates-Maginitie, Nelson-Denny, and The Stanford
Tests of Academic Skills. The intercorrelations determined for
reading-related skills range between .99 and .87-at the very limits of
the reliability of the tests! See: B.K. Waters, J.D. Barnes, P. Foley,
S. Steinhaus, D.C. Brown, Estimating the Reading Skills of Military
Applicants: Development of an asvab to rlg Conversion Table, Human
Resources Research Organization, Alexandria, Va., 1988.
3. Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical
Theory, 1905.
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