Despite the increasing importance of language testing, technology design matters related to testing have hardly been addressed in academic research, yet not enough has been written on test-taking anxiety related to computerized speaking tests. Although students nowadays are digital natives, in our experience they seem to experience a significant…

Educators, parents, and the public depend on accurate, valid, reliable, and timely information about student academic performance. Testing irregularities--breaches of test security or improper administration of academic testing--undermine efforts to use those data to improve student achievement. Unfortunately, there have been high-profile and…

The Internet has made it possible for teachers to administer online assessments with affordability and ease. However, little is known about Japanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students' attitudes of internet-based tests (IBTs). Therefore, this study aimed to measure the perceptions of IBTs among Japanese English language learners with the…

As part of the Race to the Top initiative, the United States Department of Education made nearly 1 billion dollars available in State Educational Technology grants with the goal of ramping up school technology. One result of this effort is that states, districts, and schools across the country are using computerized assessments to measure their…

This article provides a brief overview and comparison of three matching approaches in forming comparable groups for a study comparing test administration modes (i.e., computer-based tests [CBT] and paper-and-pencil tests [PPT]): (a) a propensity score matching approach proposed in this article, (b) the propensity score matching approach used by…

Sign language test development is a relatively new field within sign linguistics, motivated by the practical need for assessment instruments to evaluate language development in different groups of learners (L1, L2). Due to the lack of research on the structure and acquisition of many sign languages, developing an assessment instrument poses…

The current study explores students' collaboration and problem solving (CPS) abilities using a human-to-agent (H-A) computer-based collaborative problem solving assessment. Five CPS assessment units with 76 conversation-based items were constructed using the PISA 2015 CPS framework. In the experiment, 53,855 ninth and tenth graders in Taiwan were…

The paper presents the results of systematic review of modern scientific publications devoted to the digitalization of education. A review of Russian and foreign studies allows us to conclude that there is a relationship between high academic performance of students and the use of digital technologies. Other advantages of digitalization are:…

Integrated speaking tasks requiring test takers to read and/or listen to stimulus texts and to incorporate their content into oral performances are now used in large-scale, high-stakes tests, including the TOEFL iBT. These tasks require test takers to identify, select, and combine relevant source text information to recognize key relationships…

Through Many-Facet Rasch analysis, this study explores the rating differences between 1 computer automatic rater and 5 expert teacher raters on scoring 119 students in a computerized English listening-speaking test. Results indicate that both automatic and the teacher raters demonstrate good inter-rater reliability, though the automatic rater…

Throughout this study technology and especially mobile phones was utilized in EFL classrooms in order to see whether it can influence the process of vocabulary formative assessment and consequently improve vocabulary learning of Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners or not. Two groups of pre-intermediate EFL learners participated in this study.…

Assessment is always considered a key component in the process of teaching and learning. A major role is being played by ICT in making the process of assessment easy for teachers. As the use of ICT is increasing, the assessment is made now in a new and innovative manner. While employing ICT in assessment, the recording of responses and providing…

Language test preparation has often been studied within the consequential validity framework in relation to ethics, equity, fairness, and washback of assessment. The use of independent and integrated speaking tasks in the "TOEFL iBT"® test represents a significant development and innovation in assessing speaking ability in academic…

A key piece of a validity argument for a language assessment tool is clear overlap between assessment tasks and the target language use (TLU) domain (i.e., the domain description inference). The TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language (T2K-SWAL) corpus, which represents a variety of academic registers and disciplines in traditional…

The Internet and the software stores for mobile devices come with a huge number of digital tools for any task, and those intended for digital formative assessment (DFA) have burgeoned exponentially in the last decade. These tools vary in terms of their functionality, pedagogical quality, cost, operating systems and so forth. Teachers and learners…