Assessment materials must be checked for errors before they are presented to candidates. Any errors have the potential to reduce validity. For example, in the most extreme cases, an error may turn an otherwise well-designed exam question into one that is impossible to answer. In Cambridge University Press & Assessment, assessment materials are…

Two studies investigated the testing effects on performance and on metacognitive judgment accuracy in authentic learning settings. Across two educational psychology courses, undergraduate students had the opportunity to voluntarily participate in four different practice tests during the term--without feedback in Study 1 (N = 201 students) or with…

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children's comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an…

This article reports a classroom-based study of the effects of two types of corrective feedback (CF) on the acquisition of 3rd person "-s." One hundred and nine Chinese university students completed three communicative tasks: One group received implicit CF consisting of a single corrective move (implicit recasts), a second group received…

In this study, 118 native speakers of Japanese watched 48 separate video clips in which a teacher provided recasts on phonological or lexical errors to students in Portuguese, a language with which the participants were unfamiliar. In the video clips, six recast characteristics were manipulated: length, segmentation (segmented/whole), prosodic…

From a sociocultural perspective, collaborative writing tasks offer opportunities to negotiate in decision-making processes while also sharing responsibility for the production of a single text (Storch, 2013, "Collaborative writing in L2 classrooms." Bristol: Multilingual Matters). Although research has found benefits for such tasks…

This article advocates using Leventhal's (1980) justice judgment theory to incorporate distributive and procedural justice into summative assessment of student learning in higher education. It reviews important commonalities between the process of employee performance appraisal in organizations and practices to assess student learning in academe…

An increasing number of studies on the use of tools for automated writing evaluation (AWE) in writing classrooms suggest growing interest in their potential for formative assessment. As with all assessments, these applications should be validated in terms of their intended interpretations and uses. A recent argument-based validation framework…

Prior literature has primarily focused on the negative influences of misleading external sources on memory judgments. This study investigated whether participants can capitalize on generally reliable recommendations in order to improve their net performance; the focus was on potential roles for metacognitive monitoring (i.e., knowledge about one's…

This study focuses on the use of wikis in collaborative writing projects in foreign language learning classrooms. A total of 34 intermediate level university students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) were asked to accomplish three different wiki-based collaborative writing tasks, (argumentative, informative and decision-making) working…