Purpose: This study examined bilinguals' performance on functional executive function map tasks such as the Zoo Map from the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome and the extent to which working memory, set-shifting, and inhibition measures predicted bilinguals' performance on these tasks. Additionally, we explored the utility of…

Scoring models for the "e-rater"® system were built and evaluated for the "TOEFL"® exam's independent and integrated writing prompts. Prompt-specific and generic scoring models were built, and evaluation statistics, such as weighted kappas, Pearson correlations, standardized differences in mean scores, and correlations with…

This study investigated the effect of the interaction between test takers' background knowledge and language proficiency on their performance on the "TOEFL iBT"® reading section. Test takers with the target content background knowledge (the focal groups) and those without (the reference groups) were identified for each of the 5 selected…

Four writing samples were obtained from 638 foreign college applicants who represented three major foreign language groups (Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish), and from 60 native English speakers. All four were scored holistically, two were also scored for sentence-level and discourse-level skills, and some were scored by the Writer's Workbench…