The growing presence of computer-based testing has brought with it the capability to routinely capture the time that test takers spend on individual test items. This, in turn, has led to an increased interest in potential applications of response time in measuring intellectual ability and achievement. Goldhammer (this issue) provides a very useful…

The Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 pilot tests for the "CBAL"™ Writing assessment included experimental keystroke logging capabilities. This report documents the approaches used to capture the keystroke logs and the algorithms used to process the outputs. It also includes some preliminary findings based on the pilot data. In particular, it…

This research explores the usefulness of latent growth curve modeling in the study of pacing behavior and test speededness. Examinee response times from a high-stakes, computerized examination, collected before and after the examination was subjected to a timing change, were analyzed using a series of latent growth curve models to detect…

Data from 181 college students were used to assess whether math reasoning item response times in computerized testing can provide valid and reliable measures of a speed dimension. The alternate forms reliability of the speed dimension was .85. A two-dimensional structural equation model suggests that the speed dimension is related to the accuracy…

When power tests include a time limit, it is important to assess the possibility of "speededness" for examinees. Research on differential speededness in the past has included looking at gender and ethnic subgroups in the United States on paper and pencil tests. The needs of a global audience necessitated, and the availability of computer…

Response accuracy and response speed provide separate measures of performance. Psychometricians have tended to focus on accuracy with the goal of characterizing examinees on the basis of their ability to respond correctly to items from a given content domain. With the advent of computerized testing, response times can now be recorded unobtrusively…

The attractiveness of computer-based tests (CBTs) is due largely to their capability to expand the ways we conduct testing. A relatively unexplored application, however, is actively using the computer to reduce construct-irrelevant variance while a test is being administered. This investigation introduces the effort-monitoring CBT, in which the…

Examinee response times from a computerized adaptive test taken by 204 examinees taking a certification examination were analyzed using a hierarchical linear model. Two equations were posed: a within-person model and a between-person model. Variance within persons was eight times greater than variance between persons. Several variables…

The family of Weibull distributions was investigated as a model for the distributions of response times for items in computer-based criterion-referenced tests. The fit of these distributions were, with a few exceptions, good to excellent according to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. For a few relatively simple items, the two-parameter gamma…