The chapters in Part I introduce a variety of conceptualizations of validity.
From the building of evidence in the courtroom dramas of television to the
everyday concepts of validity that underlie arguments in daily life, evidence
and the values that bear on what counts as evidence are considered. The
focus of validation in the field of psychometrics had for a time shifted from
its conceptual underpinnings in efforts to create a technology of assessment,
but recent theorizing about validity in the fields of both psychology and
reading has returned to the seemingly commonsense views of validity.

The discussions in Parts II and III are critical of the results of practices
that have dominated reading since the 1920s. Part II introduces the appli-
cation of theoretical concepts about validity to the practice of assessment.
The first chapter in this section, chapter 3, focuses on a critique of multi-
ple-choice standardized tests used in the early 1990s. Chapter 4 critiques
individualized assessment measures. For both chapters, two critical frame-
works for analyzing the tests as artifacts are applied--one from the field of
psychology and one from reading theory. Inadequacies in both multiple-
choice standardized and individualized assessments are found as a result of
the application of the critical frameworks.

Part III examines the validity of standardized tests from the perspective
of their use. In chapter 5, Patrick Shannon presents a brief but positioned
view of the history of the use of standardized tests in the United States.
Shannon points to the ideological underpinnings of tests and argues that
tests are about the scientific management of schools, the management of
who succeeds and who fails, and the entrenchment of the system of values
represented in the tests--the entrenchment of the status quo. Using voices
of early reading psychologists like Gray, Thorndike, and Cubberly, Shannon
provides evidence that tests resulted in the reification of White, Anglo-
Saxon, middle-class values. His work further suggests that the ideologies
underpinning tests extend into reading instruction and reading curriculum
(e.g., K. S. Goodman, Shannon, Freeman, & Murphy, 1988; Shannon, 1989,
1990).

In chapter 6, Peter Johnston describes the injustices and misuses of tests
today and thus amplifies Shannon's claims. Johnston suggests that norm-
referenced, multiple-choice standardized reading assessments have multiple
consequences. First, the identities that teachers and students can make for
themselves become altered as a result of certain test uses (see also S. Murphy,
1997). Next, the altering of teaching and curriculum to meet the demands
of tests results in a narrowing of educational experiences. Continuing the
theme of ideological bias introduced by Shannon, Johnston provides numer-

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