The study covers the development and testing of the alternative mechanics survey (AMS), a modified force concept inventory (FCI), which used automatically marked free-response questions. Data were collected over a period of three academic years from 611 participants who were taking physics classes at high school and university level. A total of…

In this research report, we describe the design and empirical findings for a large-scale study of essay writing ability with approximately 2,500 high school students in Germany and Switzerland on the basis of 2 tasks with 2 associated prompts, each from a standardized writing assessment whose scoring involved both human and automated components.…

Through Many-Facet Rasch analysis, this study explores the rating differences between 1 computer automatic rater and 5 expert teacher raters on scoring 119 students in a computerized English listening-speaking test. Results indicate that both automatic and the teacher raters demonstrate good inter-rater reliability, though the automatic rater…

Approximately a third of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) items in the core domains (math, reading, and science) are constructed-response items and require human coding (scoring). This process is time-consuming, expensive, and prone to error as often (a) humans code inconsistently, and (b) coding reliability in…

Few studies have explored the subjective mental health of adolescents with intellectual disabilities, while proxy ratings indicate an overrepresentation of mental health problems. The present study reports on the design and an initial empirical evaluation of the Well-being in Special Education Questionnaire (WellSEQ). Questions, response scales,…

This paper describes a study of the computer essay-scoring program BETSY. While the use of computers in rating written scripts has been criticised in some quarters for lacking transparency or lack of fit with how human raters rate written scripts, a number of essay rating programs are available commercially, many of which claim to offer comparable…

Computer-assisted assessment offers many benefits over traditional paper methods. However, in transferring from one medium to another, it is crucial to ascertain the extent to which the new medium may alter the nature of traditional assessment practice or affect marking reliability. Whilst there is a substantial body of research comparing marking…

The work aims to improve the assessment of creative problem-solving in science education by employing language technologies and computational-statistical machine learning methods to grade students' natural language responses automatically. To evaluate constructs like creative problem-solving with validity, open-ended questions that elicit…

This research report describes changes made to the Inventory of Work-Relevant Values when it was revised for online use as a part of the Internet version of DISCOVER. Users will see the following differences between the online and CD-ROM versions of the inventory: 22 items rather than 61, simplified presentation, and the contribution of all items…