Evaluation of NVLAP personnel dosimetry testing laboratory:

Abstract

The Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL) is the testing laboratory for the National Voluntary Laboratory Accreditation Program (NVLAP) for personnel radiation dosimeters. The Center for Radiation Research (CRR) has an agreement with NVLAP to monitor this laboratory to ensure that their reference radiation fields are known with sufficient accuracy. This report describes the measurements made by CRR personnel at PNL to ensure that their M30 and M150 x-ray beams are known within the specified accuracy.

Assessing Foreign Language Proficiency of Undergraduates

“…In addition, proficiency develops very slowly; many learners would not show a measurable increase in proficiency from the beginning to the end of a course even while their achievement was progressing from day to day. According to Heaton (1990), the progress measured by classroom tests encourages students because they see that they are improving, but such would not be the case with frequent proficiency tests. A related morale factor is that college classrooms often cannot avoid true and false beginners at the first-year level.…”

Testing in Language Teaching: Classification and Functions

“…There are also ways of testing which have not been mentioned by P. Ur, but discussed by other scholars [4][5]. They are: error recognition tests when students are to recognize which word is wrong in a piece of writing and correct it; J. Heaton suggest supplying the students with incorrect sentences asking them to provide another, correct variant [4, p. 39]; word-formation tests frequently used in exams to know the students' ability to coin new words from verbs, adjectives from nouns by means of prefixes, suffixes and roots.…”

Assessing foreign/second language writing ability

“…Several disadvantages of holistic marking have also been identified. First of all, this type of marking can be unreliable if marking is done under short time constraints and with inexperienced, untrained teachers (Heaton, 1990). Second, Cohen (1994) has cautioned that longer essays often tend to receive higher marks.…”

“…First, unlike holistic marking, analytical writing scales provide teachers with a “profile” of their students' strengths and weaknesses in the area of writing. Additionally, this type of marking is very reliable if done with a population of inexperienced teachers who have had little training and grade under short time constraints (Heaton, 1990). Finally, training raters is easier because the scales are more explicit and detailed.…”