Starting in April 2025, ACT will introduce enhanced forms of the ACT® test for national online testing, with a full rollout to all paper and online test takers in national, state and district, and international test administrations by Spring 2026. ACT introduced major updates by changing the test lengths and testing times, providing more time per…

The Human Resources Development Service of Korea developed a digital exam for five representative engineering categories and conducted a pilot study comparing the findings with the paper-and-pencil exam results from the last three years. This study aimed to compare the test efficiency between digital and paper-and-pencil examinations. A digital…

Young children tend to rely on reactive cognitive control (e.g. strongly slow down after an error), even when task accuracy would benefit from proactive cognitive control (taking a slower task approach up front). We investigated if giving young primary school children opportunities to repeatedly experience tasks where success rates depend on…

While most research on scalar implicature has focused on the lexical scale "some" vs "all," here we investigated an understudied scale formed by two syntactic constructions: categorizations (e.g., "Wilma is a nurse") and comparisons ("Wilma is like a nurse"). An experimental study by Rubio-Fernandez et al.…

In this study, we validated the "ReadFree tool", a computerised battery of 12 visual and auditory tasks developed to identify poor readers also in minority-language children (MLC). We tested the task-specific discriminant power on 142 Italian-monolingual participants (8-13 years old) divided into monolingual poor readers (N = 37) and…

Low examinee effort is a major threat to valid uses of many test scores. Fortunately, several methods have been developed to detect noneffortful item responses, most of which use response times. To accurately identify noneffortful responses, one must set response time thresholds separating those responses from effortful ones. While other studies…

Background: Examinees may not make enough effort when responding to test items if the assessment has no consequence for them. These disengaged responses can be problematic in low-stakes, large-scale assessments because they can bias item parameter estimates. However, the amount of bias, and whether this bias is similar across administrations, is…

In three experiments, we used a masked prime in a verification task to investigate the processing stages occurring during multiplication fact retrieval. We aimed to investigate the retrieval process by overlapping its execution with the processing of a masked prime consisting of a number. Participants evaluated the correctness of multiplication…

In the traditional conception of working memory for word lists, phonological codes are used primarily, and semantic codes are often discarded or ignored. Yet, other evidence indicates an important role for semantic codes. We carried out a preplanned set of four experiments to determine whether phonological and semantic codes are used similarly or…

The same-different task is a classic paradigm that requires participants to judge whether two successively presented stimuli are the same or different. While this task is simple, with results that have been replicated many times, response times (RTs) and accuracy for both same and different decisions remain difficult to model. The biggest obstacle…

Performance in elementary cognitive tasks is moderately correlated with fluid intelligence and working memory capacity. These correlations are higher for more complex tasks, presumably due to increased demands on working memory capacity. In accordance with the binding hypothesis, which states that working memory capacity reflects the limit of a…

The aim of this experiment was to determine if dyad practice helped individuals become aware, use, and retain information in a dynamically changing perceptual-motor task compared with practice alone. We used a computerized perceptual-motor task, where individuals were required to intercept balls that dropped from the top of the screen. A colored…

It has been demonstrated that the Simon effect may be increased or reversed due to proportion congruency manipulation, suggesting that learned spatial irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations are used to guide responses. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that learning spatial irrelevant S-R associations by rewards may show a similar…

International large-scale assessments (ILSAs) transitioned from paper-based assessments to computer-based assessments (CBAs) facilitating the use of new item types and more effective data collection tools. This allows implementation of more complex test designs and to collect process and response time (RT) data. These new data types can be used to…

Given the ongoing development of computer-based tasks, there has been increasing interest in modelling students' behaviour indicators from log file data with contextual variables collected via questionnaires. In this work, we apply a latent regression model to analyse the relationship between latent constructs (i.e., performance, speed, and…