AIMS The accuracy of ribotyping and antibiotic resistance analysis (ARA) for prediction of sources of faecal bacterial pollution in an urban southern California watershed was determined using blinded proficiency samples. METHODS AND RESULTS Antibiotic resistance patterns and HindIII ribotypes of Escherichia coli (n = 997), and antibiotic resistance patterns of Enterococcus spp. (n = 3657) wer...

The data accumulated from 1969 to 1979 in the Diagnostic Immunology portion of the Center for Disease Control Proficiency Testing Program were evaluated for evidence of change in performance among the participating laboratories. Evidence of improved performance was found for the rubella, rheumatoid factor, tularemia, quantitative immunoglobulin (immunoglobulin G, A, and M), and hepatitis B test...

HIV-1 viral load (VL) levels are used for monitoring disease progression and antiretroviral therapy outcomes in HIV-infected patients. To assess the performance of laboratories conducting HIV-1 VL testing in resource-limited settings, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention implemented a voluntary, free-of-charge, external quality assurance program using dried tube specimens (DTSs)....

the present study seeks to investigate the potentiality of the translation task as a testing method for measuring reading comprehension. to achieve this objective, two types of translation tests, open-ended and multiple-choice tests, and two types of reading comprehension tests, multiple-choice reading comprehension and open-ended cloze tests were developed in this study. the reliability of the...

Laboratories are increasingly requested to perform CYP2C19 genetic testing when managing clopidogrel therapy, especially in patients with acute coronary syndrome undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention. To ensure high quality molecular testing and ascertain that the referring clinician has the correct information for CYP2C19 genotype-directed antiplatelet therapy, a proficiency testing sc...

Placement tests, along with the growing interest in their validation, have become increasingly important in English as a Second Language programs. To this end, the present paper illustrates procedures in designing a placement test and using it to evaluate students’ language ability by means of statistical analysis. 29 participants from three proficiency levels (beginning, intermediate, and adva...

CTT is best suited for traditional testing situations, either in group or individual settings, in which all the members of a target population, e.g., persons seeking college admission, are administered the same or parallel sets of test items. These item sets can be presented to the examinee in either a paper-and-pencil or a computer format. Regardless of format, it is important for the measurem...

We examined the relative proficiency of four languages (Spanish, German, French, English) of a multilingual speaker with aphasia, JM. JM's self-rated proficiency was consistent with his naming accuracy for nouns and verbs (The Object and Action Naming Battery, Druks & Masterson, 2000) and with his performance on selected subtests of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (Paradis & Libben, 1987). Within an...

Over 900 laboratories participated in the Diagnostic Immunology portion of the 1976 Proficiency Testing Program, which was provided by the Center of Disease Control under the authority of the Clinical Laboratories Improvement Act of 1967. One hundred specimens prepared by the Center for Disease Control for analysis were distributed on a quarterly schedule or in special surveys. Feedback from pa...

The Joint Food and Agriculture Organization/International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Division of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture, based at the IAEA in Vienna, Austria, has extensive experience in helping to develop and validate assays and has provided strong support in developing World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) norms. This paper will focus on enzyme-linked immunosorbent a...