The study of socio-cognitive abilities emerged from intelligence research, and their specificity remains controversial until today. In recent years, the psychometric structure of face cognition (FC)--a basic facet of socio-cognitive abilities--was extensively studied. In this review, we summarize and discuss the divergent psychometric structures…

This article asserts that a carefully administered informal reading inventory (IRI) provides important information on low-achieving readers that is "not" provided by an end-of-grade standardized reading test. Using case studies of students' IRI performance, we address the concept of instructional level and the necessity of teaching low…

This article reviews the evidence on the extent to which experts' perceptions of item difficulties, captured using comparative judgement, can predict empirical item difficulties. This evidence is drawn from existing published studies on this topic and also from statistical analysis of data held by Cambridge Assessment. Having reviewed the…

Cognitive learning complexity identification of assessment questions is an essential task in the domain of education, as it helps both the teacher and the learner to discover the thinking process required to answer a given question. Bloom's Taxonomy cognitive levels are considered as a benchmark standard for the classification of cognitive…

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in academic writing has raised concerns regarding accuracy, ethics, and scientific rigour. Some AI content detectors may not accurately identify AI-generated texts, especially those that have undergone paraphrasing. Therefore, there is a pressing need for efficacious approaches or guidelines to…

Language proficiency is multi-componential in nature and, according to many SLA researchers and L2 practitioners, is best captured by the concepts of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). Two of the three studies reported in this paper adopted the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2003) as the means to address the question of whether increasing…

We conducted a skills analysis on written expression curriculum-based measurement (WE-CBM) tasks completed by 117 second-grade students. As part of the skills analysis, we scored two WE-CBM tasks (i.e., narrative and expository) for correct and incorrect writing sequences, common writing errors, and sentence structures. Although a majority of…

The CCSS framework indicates more difficult texts are to be used with students. However, the rationale for increasing text difficulty, decreasing text difficulty, is unsupported by the research that shows texts have been increasing in difficulty for at least 50 years. Oral reading accuracy is a traditional method of estimating text difficulty. For…

Quantitative measures of student performance are increasingly used as proxies of educational quality and teacher ability. Such assessments assume that the quality of educational practices can be unambiguously quantitatively measured and that such measures are sufficiently precise and robust to be aggregated into policy-relevant rankings like…

"Academy of READING"® is an online program that aims to improve students' reading skills using a structured and sequential approach to learning in five core areas--phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) identified 38 studies of "Academy of READING"® for adolescent…

This article addresses the topic of spelling in American English. It discusses the popularity of spelling contests in American schools, and then explains why spelling is so hard. The author then argues how important it is to understand these factors to improve spelling accuracy. The article concludes by identifying the difficulties of language…