Predicting item difficulty is highly important in education for both teachers and item writers. Despite identifying a large number of explanatory variables, predicting item difficulty remains a challenge in educational assessment with empirical attempts rarely exceeding 25% of variance explained. This paper analyses 216 science items of key stage…

This study explores the incidence of poor comprehenders, that is, children identified as having reading comprehension difficulties, despite age-appropriate word reading skills. It supports the findings that some children do show poor reading comprehension, despite age-appropriate word reading, as measured with a phonological coding test. However,…

The study examined the contributions of "orthographic processing" factors to the spelling achievement of typically developing middle-elementary students. The researcher framed orthographic processing as a multilinguistic, multidimensional construct involving process factors related to procedural orthographic operations and product…