The present study is related to the problem associated with student assessment with online examinations at higher educational institutes (HEIs). With the current COVID-19 outbreak, the majority of educational institutes are conducting online examinations to assess their students, where there would always be a chance that the students go for…

Recently, adaptive test approaches have become a viable alternative to traditional fixed-item tests. The main advantage of adaptive tests is that they reach desired measurement precision with fewer items. However, fewer items mean that each item has a more significant effect on ability estimation and therefore those tests are open to more…

Item parameter drift (IPD) is the systematic differentiation of parameter values of items over time due to various reasons. If it occurs in computer adaptive tests (CAT), it causes errors in the estimation of item and ability parameters. Identification of the underlying conditions of this situation in CAT is important for estimating item and…

Educational assessments often require uniform test forms, for which each test form has equivalent measurement accuracy but with a different set of items. For uniform test assembly, an important issue is the increase of the number of assembled uniform tests. Although many automatic uniform test assembly methods exist, the maximum clique algorithm…

The Social Shapes Test (SST) is a measure of social intelligence which does not use human faces or rely on extensive verbal ability. The SST has shown promising validity among adults without autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but it is uncertain whether it is suitable for adults with ASD. We find measurement invariance between adults with (n = 229)…

Automated scoring of student responses to open-ended questions, including short-answer questions, has great potential to scale to a large number of responses. Recent approaches for automated scoring rely on supervised learning, i.e., training classifiers or fine-tuning language models on a small number of responses with human-provided score…

Assessing students' (mis)conceptions is a challenging task for teachers as well as for researchers. While individual assessment, for example through interviews, can provide deep insights into students' thinking, this is very time-consuming and therefore not feasible for whole classes or even larger settings. For those settings, automatically…

Purpose: Based on the general formula, which depends on the length and difficulty of the test, the number of respondents and the number of ability levels, this study aims to provide a closed formula for the adaptive tests with medium difficulty (probability of solution is p = 1/2) to determine the accuracy of the parameters for each item and in…

We developed the Physics Inventory of Quantitative Literacy (PIQL) to assess students' quantitative reasoning in introductory physics contexts. The PIQL includes several "multiple-choice-multipleresponse" (MCMR) items (i.e., multiple-choice questions for which more than one response may be selected) as well as traditional single-response…

Unlike the traditional multiple-choice (MC) format, the discrete-option multiple-choice (DOMC) format does not necessarily reveal all answer options to an examinee. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the reduced exposure of item content affects test security. We conducted an experiment in which participants were allowed to view…

The computerized adaptive tests (CAT) apply an adaptive process in which the items are tailored to individuals' ability scores. The multidimensional CAT (MCAT) designs differ in terms of different item selection, ability estimation, and termination methods being used. This study aims at investigating the performance of the MCAT designs used to…

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…

The final step of the typical process of developing educational and psychological tests is to place the selected test items in a formatted form. The step involves the grouping and ordering of the items to meet a variety of formatting constraints. As this activity tends to be time-intensive, the use of mixed-integer programming (MIP) has been…

Automated assessment using Natural Language Processing (NLP) has the potential to make English speaking assessments more reliable, authentic, and accessible. Yet without careful examination, NLP may exacerbate social prejudices based on gender or native language (L1). Current NLP-based assessments are prone to such biases, yet research and…

Spreadsheets are a core computational tool for practicing engineers and engineering students. While Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and other spreadsheet tools have some differences, numerous formulas, functions, and other tasks are common across versions and platforms. Building upon learning science frameworks showing that interactive activities…