Measurement and evaluation have been with us for a long time. Man has always been concerned with measurement and evaluation. Educators particularly have been concerned with measuring and evaluating the progress of their students. As the goals of education have become more complex and the number of students have enormously enormously increased, evaluation has, accordingly, become much more difficult. Moreover, educators have always attempted to revise existing programs and develop innovative ones.
As many people rightly perceive, a lot of responsibility for improving the society has been placed on the shoulders of educators. Seemingly, for every existing social problem there exists someone who strongly advocates that the responsibility for the solution lies within the realm of education.
Education is the most important enterprise in any society. Next to defense, it is the largest economic enterprise in most countries. At some time, every citizen is directly involved with education. More than one-fourth of the nation's population attend school. Education is truly a giant and an important undertaking and, therefore, it is crucial that its processes and products be evaluated. In fact, evaluation is a major consideration in any educational setting. Teachers have always wanted to know how much their students have learned. Also the government and private sectors which pay teachers and employ the students afterwards are interested in having precise information about students' abilities. And, finally, students, teachers, administrators, and parents all work toward achieving educational goals, and it is quite natural that they would want to ascertain the degree to which those goals have been...