Erlinda Cruz teaches fifth graders in a school whose staff has emphasized mathematics instruction as part of its school improvement program. Erlinda has developed an end of the year mathematics exam that she is confident will identify those students who will succeed or fail in their middle school mathematics courses. To verify this belief, Ms. Cruz follows as many of her students as she can to find out what their grades are in middle-school mathematics courses that they take. After three years of this follow-up effort, she has solid evidence that her fifth-grade mathematics exam helps identify students in fifth-grade who will have difficulty with their math courses in middle school. What type of validity evidence has Ms. Cruz collected?

This criterion tells us until what degree a certain measure can predict the outcome of another measure. For the given example, what Ms. Cruz does is using an exam (predictor variable) to predict what amount of students will have problems with their middle school math courses (criterion variable).

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