Practice effects on the Thorndike-McCall test over two or more hours of testing are very small¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r1 · q3
Currency · newest study 1921 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? Repeated testing across five successive forms (two hours or more of practice) produced very small improvement on the Thorndike-McCall test, though obscured by differences in form difficulty. → Arthur I. Gates 1921

Evidence¶

Arthur I. Gates 1921¶

Arthur I. Gates. (1921). An Experimental and Statistical Study of Reading and Reading Tests (Continued). The Journal of Educational Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0068367

q3 · i? · causal · r1

Analysis of grade IV and VI mean scores across five successively administered forms (Table III). The article reports practice effects are "very small" and that score irregularity shows improvement cannot be great; no effect size is printed.

"A glance at Table III will show that the effects of two hours or more of practice on Thorndike-McCall is very small. The improvement is obscured by differences in difficulty of the tests, but the irregularity of scores shows that improvement cannot be great."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• A single Thorndike-McCall administration deviates about 0.31 of a school year from the five-test composite; measuring monthly progress requires composites of 3 or 4 tests — related
• Correlations of reading tests with Stanford mental age rise steeply from grade III to grade VI — related