When the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to do in-person, on campus testing, we were forced to create a new system to screen International Teaching Assistants (ITA) for Temple university. We used this opportunity to address many of the concerns and problems that we had identified with the previous test, and created a new test that could be…

A challenge of large-scale oral communication assessments is to feasibly assess a broad construct that includes interactional competence. One possible approach in addressing this challenge is to use a spoken dialog system (SDS), with the computer acting as a peer to elicit a ratable speech sample. With this aim, an SDS was built and four trained…

In STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) courses, undergraduate laboratory classes are vital for students to develop competencies such as critical observation, collaboration, critical thinking, technical, and problem-solving skills. Thus, for students to successfully acquire these competencies, preparation for laboratory classes…

One of the most common technology-enhanced items used in large-scale K-12 testing programs is the drag-and-drop response interaction. The main research questions in this study are: (a) Does adding a drag-and-drop interface to an online test affect the accuracy of student performance? (b) Does adding a drag-and-drop interface to an online test…

As a result of the Japanese Ministry of Education's recent edict that students' written and spoken English should be assessed in university entrance exams, there is an urgent need for tools to help teachers and students prepare for these exams. Although some commercial tools already exist, they are generally expensive and inflexible. To address…

In this work, we explore the differences between proctored and unproctored Internet administration for a Basque language low-stakes test considering demographic factors such as age, gender, and knowledge level in the subject. To this aim, we have developed an ad hoc application that allows us to establish a set of filters and techniques that…

Touch screen tablets are being increasingly used in schools for learning and assessment. However, the validity and reliability of assessments delivered via tablets are largely unknown. The present study tested the psychometric properties of a tablet-based app designed to measure early literacy skills. Tablet-based tests were also compared with…

In recent years, online teaching has become extremely popular. Most institutions of higher learning are offering online courses in almost every field of study. Teaching any course online is challenging, but teaching quantitative courses, such as operations management, management science, statistics, and others, have added a more challenging…

Every language has unique phonotactics, general rules about how phonemes combine to make syllables. We know that people can implicitly learn new phonotactic rules in the laboratory, and these rules then affect their speech errors. Some types of rules, however, require a consolidation period before they influence speech errors. Two experiments are…

Allowance for multiple chances to answer constructed response questions is a prevalent feature in computer-based homework and exams. We consider the use of item response theory in the estimation of item characteristics and student ability when multiple attempts are allowed but no explicit penalty is deducted for extra tries. This is common…

One of the reported methods of cheating in online environments in the literature is CAMEO (Copying Answers using Multiple Existences Online), where harvesting accounts are used to obtain correct answers that are later submitted in the master account which gives the student credit to obtain a certificate. In previous research, we developed an…

The COVID-19 pandemic has given the entire country a crash course in virtual education and digital education platforms. School leaders have been forced to consider a set of very imperfect options as they struggle to reopen their schools. This three-brief collection identifies key issues for school leaders to consider before adopting a digital…

Purpose: This study investigated the feasibility and potential validity of an item response theory (IRT)-based computerized adaptive testing (CAT) version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words & Sentences (CDI:WS; Fenson et al., 2007) vocabulary checklist, with the objective of reducing length while maintaining…

In the wake of the Corona Virus pandemic, many universities have rapidly shifted to remote education. In this regard, students are enrolled in online learning instead of, or sometimes along with, physical classroom presence. As a result, the online assessment also appeared as an alternative method to assess students. The current research paper…

Inflectional affixes expressing the same grammatical category (e.g., subject agreement) tend to appear in the same morphological position in the word. We hypothesize that this cross-linguistic tendency toward "category clustering" is at least partly the result of a learning bias, which facilitates the transmission of morphology from one…