Background and Aims: In educational measurement, performance assessments occupy a niche for offering a true-to-life format that affords the measurement of high-level cognitive competencies and the evidence to draw inferences about intellectual capital. However, true-to-life formats also introduce myriad complexities and can skew if not outright…

Inspired by Perkins' Theories of Difficulty concept, this exploratory study examined the learning patterns of graduate students as they grappled with using the style sheet of the American Psychological Association (APA). The researchers employed task performance analysis of three APA formatting tasks, interviews, and observation during a "think…

Competency in the new literacies of the Internet is essential for participating in contemporary society. Researchers studying these new literacies are recognizing the limitations of traditional methodological tools and adapting new technologies and new media for use in research. This paper reports our exploration of usability testing software to…

Diverse strategies for marking GCSE examinations have been identified, ranging from simple automatic judgements to complex cognitive operations requiring considerable expertise. However, little is known about patterns of strategy usage or how such information could be utilised by examiners. We conducted a quantitative analysis of previous verbal…

The process of examination marking is complex, requiring examiners to engage in a variety of cognitive operations. While consideration has been given to marking practices in a few specific contexts, those of General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examiners have yet to receive serious attention. This study's aims, therefore, were: first,…

This study examined the influence of critical reading orientation on use of external strategies such as note-taking and underlining while reading an expository text. In two experiments, undergraduate students were asked either to review an article on a linguistic policy (critical reading) or to summarise it (less-critical reading). Experiment 1…

In this article, we explore how students' agency relates to both highly structured and open-ended learning environments. This is done by analysing how students' understanding of tasks evolves through their activities in relation to the representations inscribed in two technology-rich learning environments. Based on the sociocultural approach to…