This article reports on the Pittsburgh Public Schools Oral Ratings Assessment for Language Students (PPS ORALS) project, a Title VI Foreign Language Assistance Program grant-funded project to create an online testing Software program that makes large-scale oral testing in a world language not only feasible, but also easy to create, administer, and…

Podcasting has become a popular medium for accessing and assimilating information and podcasts are increasingly being used to deliver audio recordings of lectures to campus-based students. This paper describes a simple, cost-effective and file size-efficient method for producing video podcasts combining lecture slides and audio without a…

During the past few years, several Harvard paper surveys were converted to Web surveys. These were high-profile surveys endorsed by the Provost and the Dean of the College, and covered major portions of the university population (all undergraduates, all graduate students, tenured and non-tenured faculty). When planning for these surveys started in…

Technology today offers many new opportunities for innovation in educational assessment through rich new assessment tasks and potentially powerful scoring, reporting and real-time feedback mechanisms. One potential limitation for realizing the benefits of computer-based assessment in both instructional assessment and large scale testing comes in…

Assessment is one of the key elements of the teaching and learning process. It provides teachers with a means of evaluating the quality of their instruction. Students also use it to drive and direct their learning. Online teaching and learning will continue to become more important to Australian universities in order for them to remain competitive…

This applied dissertation was designed to provide better access to current preparation strategies for passing the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test. The test preparation strategies did not meet the needs of the students. The students did not know how to use the computer to study for the test and did not know how to study at…

In this technical report, we describe the development and piloting of a series of mathematics progress monitoring measures intended for use with students in grades kindergarten through eighth grade. These measures, available as part of easyCBM[TM], an online progress monitoring assessment system, were developed in 2007 and 2008 and administered to…

As GED (General Educational Development) Testing Service considers the feasibility of a computer administration of the GED Tests, one issue being considered is the difference in costs of supplying only a computer-based format vs. offering both computer-based and paper formats of the GED Tests. A significant concern then arises as to whether…

This report provides a two-part evaluation of the IntelliMetric[SM] automated essay scoring system based on its performance scoring essays from the Analytic Writing Assessment of the Graduate Management Admission Test[TM] (GMAT[TM]). The IntelliMetric system performance is first compared to that of individual human raters, a Bayesian system…

Increased demands for colleges and universities to engage in outcomes assessment for accountability purposes have accelerated the need to bridge the gap between higher education practice and the fields of measurement, assessment, and evaluation. The "Handbook on Measurement, Assessment, and Evaluation in Higher Education" provides higher…

This proof-of-concept investigation describes a computer-based approach for deriving the knowledge structure of individuals and of groups from their written essays, and considers the convergent criterion-related validity of the computer-based scores relative to human rater essay scores and multiple-choice test scores. After completing a…

Introduction: Few studies have rigorously evaluated the effectiveness of health-related continuing education using satellite distribution. This study assessed participants' professional characteristics and their changes in knowledge, attitudes, and actions taken after viewing a public health preparedness training course on mass vaccination…

This study seeks to determine whether item features are related to observed differences in item difficulty (DIF) between computer- and paper-based test delivery media. Examinees responded to 60 quantitative items similar to those found on the GRE general test in either a computer-based or paper-based medium. Thirty-eight percent of the items were…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is defined as the computer technology that evaluates and scores the written prose (Shermis & Barrera, 2002; Shermis & Burstein, 2003; Shermis, Raymat, & Barrera, 2003). AES systems are mainly used to overcome time, cost, reliability, and generalizability issues in writing assessment (Bereiter, 2003; Burstein,…

Learning performance assessment aims to evaluate what knowledge learners have acquired from teaching activities. Objective technical measures of learning performance are difficult to develop, but are extremely important for both teachers and learners. Learning performance assessment using learning portfolios or web server log data is becoming an…