Thousands of education institutions worldwide rely on IELTS scores as criteria for accepting international students whose first language is not English. Individual studies have found varying degrees of strength of correlations and conflicting results between IELTS entry scores and subsequent academic success. These conflicting results were…

For institutions where English is the primary language of instruction, English assessments for admissions such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and International English Language Testing System (IELTS) give admissions decision-makers a sense of a student's skills in academic English. Despite this explicit purpose, these exams…

Curriculum-based exit exams play a crucial role in program assessment and measuring student achievement of program learning outcomes (PLOs). This study aims to examine the validity of using an internal exit exam as a direct assessment tool to evaluate student learning and attainment of PLOs. The validation entails evaluating and correlating…

High school GPAs (HSGPAs) are often perceived to represent inconsistent levels of readiness for college across high schools, while test scores (e.g., ACT scores) are seen as comparable. This study tests those assumptions, examining variation across high schools of both HSGPAs and ACT scores as measures of academic readiness for college. We find…

Test validity can be jeopardized to the extent that test scores are contaminated by factors other than those intended by the test. Many method specific factors and examinees' personal characteristics can influence test performance. In this study the contribution of four construct-irrelevant factors, namely, exam anxiety, reading anxiety, ambiguity…

The purpose of this study was to explore the psychometric properties of an Arabic translation of the Gifted Rating Scales-School Form (GRS-S) on a national sample of 907 students from Cycle 1 (Grades 1 to 4) and Cycle 2 (Grades 5 to 10) from five governorates in Oman (Muscat, Dhofar, Al-Batinah North, Al-Sharqiyah South, and Al-Dhahira). The…

The 3 × 2 achievement goal framework comprising task-approach, task-avoidance, self-approach, self-avoidance, other-approach, and other-avoidance goals is the most recent conceptual development in goal orientation research. The purpose of this study was to extend the current literature by investigating the validity of the 3 × 2 Achievement Goal…

The psychometric properties of a new, multidimensional measure of test anxiety, the Test Anxiety Measure for College Students (TAM-C), were examined in a sample of 720 undergraduate students. Results of confirmatory factor analyses provided support for a six-factor (Cognitive Interference, Physiological Hyperarousal, Social Concerns,…

We conducted two studies to replicate and extend, as well as test, the limits of previous findings regarding an apparent disconnect between scientific-reasoning skills in psychological science, on the one hand, and scores on standardized tests of general intelligence, on the other. In Study 1, we examined whether this disconnect would extend…

In today's educational climate, liberal arts institutions must demonstrate that their educational goals are being met. This paper presents reliability and stability testing of a concise, research-based survey instrument designed to examine student perceptions of academic experiences that is particularly suited to institutions rooted in the liberal…

This study examines the predictive validity of the TOEFL iBT with respect to academic achievement as measured by the first-year grade point average (GPA) of Chinese students at Purdue University, a large, public, Research I institution in Indiana, USA. Correlations between GPA, TOEFL iBT total and subsection scores were examined on 1990 mainland…

The study explores the relationships between students' experiences of the teaching-learning environment and their approaches to learning, and the effects of these variables on academic achievement. Two three-stage models were tested with structural equation modelling techniques. The "Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students"…

AP Potential™ is an educational guidance tool that uses PSAT/NMSQT® scores to identify students who have the potential to do well on one or more Advanced Placement® (AP®) Exams. Students identified as having AP potential, perhaps students who would not have been otherwise identified, should consider enrolling in the corresponding AP course if they…

Data from 787 international undergraduate students at an urban university in the United States were used to demonstrate the importance of separating a sample into meaningful subgroups in order to demonstrate the ability of an English language assessment to predict the first-year grade point average (GPA). For example, when all students were pooled…

Critical thinking is a learning outcome highly valued by higher education institutions and the workforce. The Educational Testing Service (ETS) has designed a next generation assessment, the HEIghten™ critical thinking assessment, to measure students' critical thinking skills in analytical and synthetic dimensions. This paper introduces the…