A teacher's ability to read effectively is critical to that individual's ability to teach reading skills. Correspondingly, most state departments of education require that prospective teachers earn a passing score on a standardized reading comprehension test before they can enter university-based teacher education programs or otherwise get a…

Testing reading has always been indispensable in language tests. The present study aims to evaluate three parallel reading tests from the National College English Test Band Four (CET-4) in June 2021 in terms of reading ability orientations, text readability and its correlations with reading performances. The quantitative analysis reveals: (1) in…

Many students experience a language-related barrier which may keep them from fully understanding and engaging in complex chemistry content. Although dense and technically rich scientific language is challenging for most students to interpret, it can become a systematic barrier for English Language Learner (ELL) students when it cognitively…

The development and evaluation of valid assessments of scientific reasoning are an integral part of research in science education. In the present study, we used the linear logistic test model (LLTM) to analyze how item features related to text complexity and the presence of visual representations influence the overall item difficulty of an…

In this study, the author examined potential mediators of the negative relationship between the absolute difference in items' lengths and their inter-item correlation size. Fifty-two randomly ordered items from five personality scales were administered to 622 university students, and 46 respondents from a survey website rated the items'…

Language is frequently discussed as barrier to mathematics word problems. Hence this paper presents the initial findings of a linguistic analysis of numeracy skills test sample items. The theoretical perspective of multi-modal text analysis underpinned this study, in which data was extracted from the ten sample numeracy test items released by the…