Test score comparability in international large-scale assessments (LSA) is of utmost importance in measuring the effectiveness of education systems and understanding the impact of education on economic growth. To effectively compare test scores on an international scale, score linking is widely used to convert raw scores from different linguistic…

This dissertation comprises three complementary studies that aim to advance the understanding and practice of Individualized Education Programs (IEP) and Present Levels of Academic Achievement and Functional Performance (PLAAFP) development in special education. In the first study, we systematically reviewed empirical research measuring IEP…

Source-based writing, in which writers read or listen to academic content before writing, has been considered to better assess academic writing skills than independent writing tasks (Read, 1990; Weigle, 2004). Because scores resulting from ratings of test takers' source-based writing task responses are treated as indicators of their academic…

Reliability and validity are two important topics that have been studied for many decades in the educational measurement field, including discussions of Writing Studies' subfield of writing assessment, since the establishment of the College Entrance Exam Board [CEEB] in 1899 (Huot et al., 2010). In recent years, scholarly conversations of fairness…

Constructed response (CR) items are widely used in large-scale testing programs, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and many district and state-level assessments in the United States. One unique feature of CR items is that they depend on human raters to assess the quality of examinees' work. The judgment of human…

The present dissertation investigated the impact of scales/scoring methods and prompt linguistic features on the measurement quality of L2 English elicited imitation (EI). Scales/scoring methods are an important feature for the validity and reliability of L2 EI test, but less is known (Yan et al., 2016). Prompt linguistic features are also known…

Background: Service learning is an educational pedagogy that provides students with an opportunity to apply classroom knowledge to real-life situations. There are three components of service learning: course outcomes, service, and reflection. One barrier to incorporating service learning into nursing curriculum is the lack of a standardized…

Rater scoring has an impact on writing test reliability and validity. Thus, there has been a continued call for researchers to investigate issues related to rating (Crusan, 2015). Investigating the scoring process and understanding how raters arrive at particular scores are critical "because the score is ultimately what will be used in making…

The Next Generation Science Standards propose a multidimensional model of science learning, comprised of Core Disciplinary Ideas, Science and Engineering Practices, and Crosscutting Concepts (NGSS Lead States, 2013). Accordingly, there is a need for student assessment aligned with the new standards. Creating assessments that validly and reliably…

Curriculum-based measurement (CBM) is an assessment technique that has become increasingly popular in schools, gaining importance with the recent national emphasis on school and teacher accountability for student achievement. CBM is used to monitor student performance to provide an indicator of which students are at-risk of not achieving grade…

Hispanic-American youth have been identified as a high-risk group for developing behavioral and emotional difficulties. Currently, there exist few behavioral and emotional screening measures targeting young children, with even fewer accessible to the Spanish speaking populations in the U.S. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether…

Concept maps provide a way to assess how well students have developed an organized understanding of how the concepts taught in a unit are interrelated and fit together. However, concept maps are challenging to score because of the idiosyncratic ways in which students organize their knowledge (McClure, Sonak, & Suen, 1999). The construct a map…

High fidelity simulation has become a widespread and costly learning strategy in nursing education because it can fill the gap left by a shortage of clinical sites. In addition, high fidelity simulation is an active learning strategy that is thought to increase higher order thinking such as clinical reasoning and judgment skills in nursing…

The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of alternative approaches to administering and scoring curriculum-based measurement for written expression. Specifically, three response durations (3, 5, and 7 minutes) and six score types (total words written, words spelled correctly, percent of words spelled correctly,…

Rubrics are a means to communicate the standards or criteria of an assignment and to assess student work formatively or summatively by faculty, peer, and/or self. Given that assessment is a necessary and mandated component of education, this study sought to summarize what is known about rubrics as an assessment tool for student learning. In this…