Assessing the difficulty of reading comprehension questions is crucial to educational methodologies and language understanding technologies. Traditional methods of assessing question difficulty rely frequently on human judgments or shallow metrics, often failing to accurately capture the intricate cognitive demands of answering a question. This…

In international large-scale assessments, students may not be compelled to answer every test item: a student can decide to skip a seemingly difficult item or may drop out before the end of the test is reached. The way these missing responses are treated will affect the estimation of the item difficulty and student ability, and ultimately affect…

Full-information item analysis provides item developers and reviewers comprehensive empirical evidence of item quality, including option response frequency, point-biserial index (PBI) for distractors, mean-scores of respondents selecting each option, and option trace lines. The multi-serial index (MSI) is introduced as a more informative…

Proponents of extensive reading argue that test-oriented language teaching and learning could discourage extensive reading practice. However, this has not been examined empirically. Given the possibility that the consistency of reading texts used in extensive reading and entrance examinations is one source of washback, the present study employed a…

This article asserts that a carefully administered informal reading inventory (IRI) provides important information on low-achieving readers that is "not" provided by an end-of-grade standardized reading test. Using case studies of students' IRI performance, we address the concept of instructional level and the necessity of teaching low…

Analyzing heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) plays a crucial role in understanding the impacts of educational interventions. A standard practice for HTE analysis is to examine interactions between treatment status and preintervention participant characteristics, such as pretest scores, to identify how different groups respond to treatment.…

A C-Test is a gap-filling test for measuring language competence in the first and second language. C-Tests are usually analyzed with polytomous Rasch models by considering each passage as a super-item or testlet. This strategy helps overcome the local dependence inherent in C-Test gaps. However, there is little research on the best polytomous…

Item difficulty modeling studies involve (a) hypothesizing item features, or item response demands, that are likely to predict item difficulty with some degree of accuracy; and (b) entering the features as independent variables into a regression equation or other statistical model to predict difficulty. In this review, we report findings from 13…

Analyzing heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) plays a crucial role in understanding the impacts of educational interventions. A standard practice for HTE analysis is to examine interactions between treatment status and pre-intervention participant characteristics, such as pretest scores, to identify how different groups respond to treatment.…

New MAP® Growth™ assessments are being developed that administer items more closely matched to the grade level of the student. However, MAP Growth items are calibrated with samples that typically consist of students from a variety of grades, including the target grade to which an item is aligned. While this choice of calibration sample is…

Estimating the difficulty of reading tests is critical in second language education and assessment. This study was aimed at examining various text features that might influence the difficulty level of a high-stakes reading comprehension test and predict test takers' scores. To this end, the responses provided by 17,900 test takers on the reading…

Comparing language tests and test preparation materials holds important implications for the latter's validity and reliability. However, not enough studies compare such materials across a wide range of indices. Therefore, this study investigated the text complexity of IELTS academic reading tests (IRT) and IELTS reading practice tests (IRPrT).…

This study investigated the extent to which third graders (n = 84) from predominantly low-socioeconomic status families had access to books matched to their reading levels in their homes. On average, students showed home visitors books that fell within the Common Core State Standards' recommended text difficulty range for Grade 3 (mean Lexile =…

The increasing popularity of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) in non-native English-speaking countries has generated a demand for concrete examples in the creation of CEFR-based tests that assess the four main English skills. In response, this research endeavors to provide insight into the development and validation of a…

To ensure that student academic growth in a subject area is accurately captured, it is imperative that the underlying scale remains stable over time. As item parameter stability constitutes one of the factors that affects scale stability, NWEA® periodically conducts studies to check for the stability of the item parameter estimates for MAP®…