The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is a state-led consortium designed to create next-generation assessments that, compared to traditional K-12 assessments, more accurately measure student progress toward college and career readiness. The PARCC assessments are aligned to the Common Core State Standards…

Are prospective employers getting "quality" educated, degreed applicants and are academic institutions that offer online degree programs ensuring the quality control of the courses/programs offered? The issue specifically addressed in this paper is not with all institutions offering degrees through online programs or even with all online…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is the presentation of a new method for blog quality assessment. The method uses the temporal sequence of link creation events between blogs as an implicit source for the collective tacit knowledge of blog authors about blog quality. Design/methodology/approach: The blog data are processed by the novel method for…

There are three purposes for evaluation: evaluation for action to aid the decision making process, evaluation for understanding to further enhance enlightenment and evaluation for control to ensure compliance to standards. This article argues that the primary function of evaluation in the "Catherine Wheel" computer-based assessment (CBA)…

Are prospective employers getting "quality" educated degreed applicants and are academic institutions that offer online degree programs ensuring the quality control of the courses/programs offered? The issue specifically addressed in this paper is not with all institutions offering degrees through online programs or even with all online…

In computerized adaptive testing, updating parameter estimates using adaptive testing data is often called online calibration. In this paper, how to evaluate whether the adaptive testing model used for online calibration fits the item response model used sufficiently is studied. Three approaches are investigated, based on a Lagrange multiplier…

This investigation of the comparability of writing assessment prompts was conducted in two phases. In an exploratory Phase I, 47 writing prompts administered in the computer-based Test of English as a Foreign Language[TM] (TOEFL[R] CBT) from July through December 1998 were examined. Logistic regression procedures were used to estimate prompt…

Providing detailed, constructive and helpful feedback is an important contribution to effective student learning. Quality assurance is also required to ensure consistency across all students and reduce error rates. However, with increasing workloads and student numbers these goals are becoming more difficult to achieve. An automated feedback…

As awarding bodies modernise their procedures and incorporate elements of e-assessment into their qualifications, e-portfolios are emerging as a popular method of allowing candidates to display their abilities. All major United Kingdom awarding bodies now accept evidence from e-portfolio products for at least some of their qualifications. Although…

Computer-based testing (CBT) is typically implemented using one of three general test delivery models: (1) multiple fixed testing (MFT); (2) computer-adaptive testing (CAT); or (3) multistage testing (MSTs). This article reviews some of the real cost drivers associated with CBT implementation--focusing on item production costs, the costs…