The debate over the extensive use of paired and group oral assessments has yielded an enriched body of theoretical inquiries and empirical investigations, marking a shift from viewing second language (L2) speaking ability as residing in the individual to emphasizing joint construction distributed among interlocutors within local contexts. This…

This paper investigates the use of new media technologies, in particular wikis, for the compiling and grading of group assessment tasks. Wikis are open web pages that can be viewed and modified by anyone with internet access and are well known for their collaborative nature. Wikis are also transparent, which means that any edit/modification is…

In the attempt to identify or prevent unfair tests, both quantitative analyses and logical evaluation are often used. For the most part, fairness evaluation is a pragmatic attempt at determining whether procedural or substantive due process has been accorded to either a group of test takers or an individual. In both the individual and comparative…

The Jomtien conference in 1990 on Education for All is seen by many as a turning point for the introduction of increased monitoring and evaluation of the quality of education systems around the world. Internationally, debates have arisen about the nature and frequency of assessment and its impact on education systems with its intended and…

Although summative assessment is indispensable for determining whether or not students meet the content standards, it alone is insufficient for providing teachers and administrators with the information necessary to make ongoing decisions about instruction. This article looks at the motivational impact of the assessment on students' achievement…

Several current international comparative large-scale assessments of educational achievement (ICLSA) make use of "Rasch models", to address functions essential for valid cross-cultural comparisons. From a historical perspective, ICLSA and Georg Rasch's "models for measurement" emerged at about the same time, half a century ago. However, the…

The present study investigates the relation between spatial ability and visuo-spatial and verbal working memory in spatial text processing. In two experiments, participants listened to a spatial text (Experiments 1 and 2) and a non-spatial text (Experiment 1), at the same time performing a spatial or a verbal concurrent task, or no secondary task.…

This article is a commentary for the special issue on the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a community tool to assess children's school readiness and developmental outcomes at a group level. The EDI is administered by kindergarten teachers, who assess their kindergarten students on 5 developmental domains: physical health and well-being, social…

Using small groups in student cooperative learning enterprises has become a major trend in American higher education (Cheng and Warren 2000). However, several practical issues involving the assessment of an individual's performance in groups have sometimes created resistance to the method from both students and parents (Kagan 1995). This article…

Because of an increasing quality concern for higher education, additional attention is being paid to new educational principles with a more student- and competence-centred vision. Project-based education is one of the learning environments congruent with these principles. Ideally, the students in this learning environment are assessed by suitable…

Examined how well three measures, representing points on a traditional-alternative mathematics assessment continuum, discriminated fourth graders achieving above, at, and below grade level, and how cooperative testing affected performance assessment. Found strong discriminative validity for the more traditional measures but not for performance…