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This article reports a study of the relationship between students' attitudes toward the subject of German, the course material, and the teacher and students' achievements in German as a foreign language. Attitudes and achievements were measured at the beginning and end of the first year of German (i.e., the second year of Dutch secondary school). As expected, students who had a positive attitude rated higher in achievement than those having negative attitudes, both at the beginning and at the end of the school year. Direct (causal) effects of students' attitudes on achievement (and vice versa) could not be established. Students enrolled in a communicative course had a more positive attitude toward their course material than those studying in a grammatically oriented course. AFFECTIVE CHARACTERISTICS ARE IMPORTANT CONDITIONS FOR LEARNINGStudents with optimal attitude, motivation, and self-concept employ the study time allotted to them efficiently and consequently exhibit high achievements (Bloom, 1976;Slavin, 1994). Attitudes toward school subjects are a major consideration for learning (Boekaerts 8c Simons, 1992). A considerable amount of research into students' attitudes toward foreign languages and learning has already been done (e.g., Brown).Virtually all studies to date have been con- ~~The Modern Language Journal, 80, iv (1996) QlYY6 The Modern LanguagrJournal 0026-7902/96/494-508 $1.50/0

This article reports a study of the relationship between students' attitudes toward the subject of German, the course material, and the teacher and students' achievements in German as a foreign language. Attitudes and achievements were measured at the beginning and end of the first year of German (i.e., the second year of Dutch secondary school). As expected, students who had a positive attitude rated higher in achievement than those having negative attitudes, both at the beginning and at the end of the school year. Direct (causal) effects of students' attitudes on achievement (and vice versa) could not be established. Students enrolled in a communicative course had a more positive attitude toward their course material than those studying in a grammatically oriented course.

In recent years many countries have introduced authentic performance-based assessments in their national exam systems. Teachers' ratings of their own candidates' performances may suffer from errors of leniency and range restriction. The goal of this study was to examine the impact of manipulating the descriptiveness, balancedness, and polarity of the rating scales on the elevation and spread of the performance ratings. The study was conducted in the field setting of a (simulated) high-stakes national exam in Dutch pre-vocational education. A total of 55 teachers rated the performances of 652 candidates (aged ±16) on four authentic performance-based tasks. Multivariate multilevel analyses found the psychometric quality of the teachers' performance ratings to be more favorable for positively unbalanced scales than for balanced scales. Positively unbalanced rating scales yielded the lowest (i.e., least generous) and most discriminative ratings. The descriptiveness and polarity of the rating scales were of lesser importance for the rating distributions. On the basis of the findings it was decided to introduce positively unbalanced scales in the national exams for pre-vocational education.