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…

Questionnaire scales that are mixed-worded, i.e. include both positively and negatively worded items, often suffer from issues like low reliability and more complex latent structures than intended. Part of the problem might be that some responders fail to respond consistently to the mixed-worded items. We investigated the prevalence and impact of…

Some statewide testing programs allow students to receive corrective feedback and revise their answers during testing. Despite its pedagogical benefits, the effects of providing revision opportunities remain unknown in the context of alternate assessments. Therefore, this study examined student data from a large-scale alternate assessment that…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine elementary school students' critical thinking skills and their impact. Methodology: This research was a qualitative case study. The subjects of this study were 29 fifth-grade students and three teachers at an elementary school, chosen by a purposive sampling technique. Data were collected through observation,…

This paper examines the effect of COVID-19 on learning loss and learning inequality in South Africa using 2016 and 2021 Grade 4 PIRLS datasets. On average, South African Grade 4 reading achievement declined by 31 PIRLS points from 320 in 2016 to 288 in 2021, equivalent to a decline of 0.29 standard deviations or 50-60% of a year of learning. The…

This research aimed to investigate animation-based achievement tests according to the item format, psychometric features, students' performance, and gender. The study sample consisted of 52 fifth-grade students in Samsun/Turkey in 2017-2018. Measures of the research were open-ended (OE), animation-based open-ended (AOE), multiple-choice (MC), and…

According to the RAND model framework, reading comprehension test performance is influenced by readers' reading skills or reader characteristics, test properties, and their interactions. However, little empirical research has systematically compared the impacts of reader characteristics, test properties, and reader-test interactions across…

In this experimental study, 20 multiple-choice test items from the Massachusetts Grade 5 science test were linguistically simplified, and original and simplified test items were administered to 310 English learners (ELs) and 1,580 non-ELs in four Massachusetts school districts. This study tested the hypothesis that specific linguistic features of…

This classroom experiment investigates the effects of adding representational pictures to multiple-choice and constructed-response test items to understand the role of the response format for the multimedia effect in testing. Participants were 575 fifth- and sixth-graders who answered 28 science test items--seven items in each of four experimental…

Increasing linguistic diversity in classrooms has led researchers to examine the validity and fairness of standardized achievement tests, specifically concerning whether test score interpretations are free of bias and score use is fair for all students. This study examined whether mathematics achievement test items that contain complex language…

This study examined the validity of trilingual test as a test accommodation to assess the Indigenous pupils' mathematical performance in Malaysia. The study employed two tests; BM-only test with items written in Malay language (BM) and trilingual test, which had items written in BM and English, and oral audio recording in their native Temiar…

Efficient waste management is a major prerequisite for reaching sustainability as every one of us produces waste. Thus, educational interventions need to offer promising assistance to reduce individual waste as much as possible to promote environmentally friendly behavior beyond stereotypical notions about waste disposal. Those who know about all…

Prior research suggests that males outperform females, on average, on multiple-choice items compared to their relative performance on constructed-response items. This paper characterizes the extent to which gender achievement gaps on state accountability tests across the United States are associated with those tests' item formats. Using roughly 8…

Test-based accountability often produces score inflation. Most studies have evaluated inflation by comparing trends on a high-stakes test and a lower stakes audit test. However, Koretz and Beguin (2010) noted weaknesses of audit tests and suggested self-monitoring assessments (SMAs), which incorporate audit items into high-stakes tests. This…

Many recent studies have aimed to demonstrate that specific types of reading comprehension depend on different underlying cognitive abilities. In these studies, it is often implicitly assumed that reading comprehension is a multidimensional construct. The general aim of this study was to examine the dimensionality of a large pool of reading…