Special Education

BEST PLACE TO START when looking for NONCOMMERCIAL TESTS ***

 APA's PsycTESTS database is the easiest way to identify and access the full text of instruments. If you DO NOT find what you need there, try some of the  resources and strategies described in the other boxes below.

Commercial/Published Tests

Commercial/Published Tests are available directly from a commercial test publisher for a fee and typically are acccessible only to qualified/certified professionals. You will seldom, if ever, find the items from these instruments in the public domain. See the tab labeled Commercial/Published Tests for details on how to identify and locate commercial tests and measures.

Commercial Tests: Indexes & Reviews

Using Subject Databases to Find Unpublished Tests

CINAHL Ultimate indexes nursing and allied health professions literature. In it, you may find articles describing the use of a test instrument as well as occasionally the test instrument itself.  

Steps and Tips for Searching

The Instrumentation (IN) field in a record includes the names of instruments used in the research study.

To search for articles that used a specific instrument...

  • From the main search page, type the instrument title (or title keyword(s)) into the search box, and use the dropdown menu to specify to search in the "IN Instrumentation" field.
  • Click on "Search."
  • The resulting set of documents will all contain the word or phrase searched in the Instrumentation field of each record.

 

To search for an appended instrument,

  • If the instrument itself is included in CINAHL, go to  the SEARCH OPTIONS section in the middle of the advanced search screen and under PUBLICATION TYPE, choose either  "research instrument" OR "questionnaire/scale" and then enter your search terms in the search box at the top of the page. Your search results should include insturments that have those keywords.

ERIC (Proquest) (Educational Resources Information Center) includes scholarly articles, reports, curriculum and teaching guides and conference papers covering multiple levels of education from preK to higher education. 

 Steps and Tips for Searching​

  • From the main search page, type in your keywords/search term(s) in the first line
  • in the line below, change the connector dropdown to AND and then enter words such as: test* OR measure* OR survey* OR questionnaire* OR scale* OR batter* OR inventor* OR checklist* OR instrument* OR pretest* OR posttest* OR interview*
  • This will give you general results -- any article that used one of these methods could come up.

PsycINFO the database to search for psychology related articles.  

  • Use the advanced search box's "Select a field" dropdown menu and choose the "TM Tests & Measures" field and then enter keywords related to the instrument you would like to find. 
  • To search for articles that have the full text of the test inlcuded, in the advanced search after adding your keywords to one line, in the line below, add the word "appended" to the search and change the "Select a field" dropdown menu to "TM Tests & Measures" field.

Note that under the SEARCH OPTIONS section there is a "Tests & Measures" search box that also allows you to search for words in titles of tests.  

PubMed indexes biomedical articles.

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) headings for the concept of tests and measurement include: questionnaires, psychological tests, psychometrics outcome, and process assessment (health care). Locating an instrument or test in Pubmed may also be done using important words from the title of a particular instrument.

Google Scholar (be sure to use this link or the UNM Library's Google Scholar link in order to easily connect to UNM resources you find in Google Scholar). 

Google Scholar is often a good tool to use to search for a known item, such as a test or measure.

Books of Tests & Measurements