The purpose of this study was to investigate the validity of the vocabulary subsection of a high-stakes university entrance exam for Ph.D. programs using the argument-based approach. All the three different versions of the test administered in a period of five years and the responses of 12,500 test-takers were studied. The study focused on four…

The findings of previous research into the compatibility of stakeholders' perceptions with statistical estimations of item difficulty are not seemingly consistent. Furthermore, most research shows that teachers' estimation of item difficulty is not reliable since they tend to overestimate the difficulty of easy items and underestimate the…

In large scale multiple-choice (MC) tests alternate forms of a test may be developed to prevent cheating by changing the order of items or by changing the position of the response options. The assumption is that since the content of the test forms are the same the order of items or the positions of the response options do not have any effect on…

Effective test preparation for high-stakes English language tests is crucial for candidates whose futures depend on attaining a particular score. An increasing number of studies have investigated the role of test preparation; however, these studies have been exclusively conducted in individual contexts and countries around the world. This study…

In many reading comprehension tests, different test formats are employed. Two commonly used test formats to measure reading comprehension are sustained passages followed by some questions and cloze items. Individual differences in handling test format peculiarities could constitute a source of score variance. In this study, a bifactor Rasch model…

Cognitive complexity is traditionally used for describing human cognition along a simplicity-complexity axis in tests like TOFEL IBT and GRE where text creation and rhetorical organization are quintessentially important. Accordingly, this study sought to investigate the impact of mentor text modelling on cognitive complexity of academic writing…