Epistemic engagement among higher education learners often involves cognitive appraisal operations which generate emotional processes. This study aims to develop and validate a multidimensional "Emotional Presence Scale" (EPS) to measure learners' experience of emotion due to cognitive appraisal in epistemic processes. Based on the…

Objectives: Educators in both Western and non-Western contexts are increasingly acknowledging the necessity of screening for students' psychological dispositions to identify and effectively support at-risk students. The Social-Emotional Health Survey--Higher Education (SEHS-HE) has the potential to offer a practical yet comprehensive measure of…

This study is a conceptual replication of Teimouri et al.'s (2022) investigation into the validity of the second language (L2) grit scale (the L2-Grit scale). There are several concerns about the generalizability of the findings of Teimouri et al. (2022), especially regarding the discriminant validity of the scale and the relation of L2 grit with…

The Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS) has been validated in several East Asian countries, but the measurement equivalence of its four dimensions and construct validity has not yet been evaluated in Japan. Results from Japanese (n = 298) and South Korean (n = 301) college students indicated good to excellent internal consistency estimates, and…

The purpose of this paper is to (a) establish whether meaning recall and meaning recognition item formats test psychometrically distinct constructs of vocabulary knowledge which measure separate skills, and, if so, (b) determine whether each construct possesses unique properties predictive of L2 reading proficiency. Factor analyses and…

Self-efficacy has emerged as a popular construct in second language research, especially in the frontline and practitioner-researcher spaces. A troubling trend in the relevant literature is that self-efficacy is often measured in a general or global manner. Such research ignores the fact that self-efficacy is a smaller context-driven construct…

The performance decision tree (PDT; Fulcher et al., 2011) is a rubric style that is applicable to performance assessment, with origins in Upshur and Turner's (1995) empirically derived binary-choice, boundary-definition (EBB) scale. It is easier for raters to assess performance by evaluating multiple binary-choice descriptors. Additionally,…

Addressing the lack of English tests that measure critical thinking (CT) abilities of EFL learners, this study aims to develop an English Critical Thinking Test (ECTT) designed to measure the consistency, analysis, and inference CT skills. It is a follow-up to a pilot study to accumulate validity evidence for the use of the ECTT. A total of 262…

This paper presents improvements made to a computerized adaptive testing (CAT)-based version of the FCI (FCI-CAT) in regards to test security and test efficiency. First, we will discuss measures to enhance test security by controlling for item overexposure, decreasing the risk that respondents may (i) memorize the content of a pretest for use on…

In Japan, school teachers experience mental health issues, leading to absences or leave from their duties. While extended working hours significantly contribute to this problem, diminished self-esteem has emerged as the primary causal factor. Reduced self-esteem is frequently correlated with diminished self-efficacy across multiple facets of…

An interesting Sangaku problem was chosen and a multidirectional study was performed, which included finding the locus of a circle's center moving while being tangent to two circles. It also included finding the radius of that circle given the datum that it is also tangent to the side of an isosceles triangle. Two different proofs are presented of…

It is important to identify suitable parameters to measure and assess the quality of physical education. This paper aims to understand such measuring tool by focusing on professional perceptions and areas of concern of quality physical education (QPE). The research survey includes data gathered from 799 professionals in 11 cities in Asia. These…

The substantive component of construct validity requires a confrontation between empirical test results and content relevance. The Vocabulary Size Test (VST) has been extensively validated in terms of empirical results. Less is known, however, about expert judgments of content relevance. The VST was constructed and validated according to the…

This study measures the perceptions of English language teachers at Japanese universities. It combines the results of online questionnaires on assessment practices and another one on teacher autonomy. Results suggest that according to teachers' self-reports of assessment practices, certain measures of assessment quality are being affected by the…

This study searched for open-source semantic similarity tools and evaluated their effectiveness in automated content scoring of fact-based essays written by English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) learners. Fifty writing samples under a fact-based writing task from an academic English course in a Japanese university were collected and a gold standard…