More than 20 years after the first round of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), it has become one of the most important large-scale international assessments, at a global level and in particular in Europe. Thus, a growing number of scholars have examined or discussed its research design. Nonetheless, a key feature of…

The purpose of this study is to introduce and evaluate a method for generating reading comprehension items using template-based automatic item generation. To begin, we describe a new model for generating reading comprehension items called the text analysis cognitive model assessing inferential skills across different reading passages. Next, the…

The State NAEP program only reports the mean achievement estimate of a subgroup within a given state if it samples at least 62 students who identify with the subgroup. Since some subgroups of students constitute small proportions of certain states' general student populations, these low-incidence groups of students are seldom sufficiently sampled…

Several international large-scale assessments were conducted at the turn of the new century, and during the past two decades the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) completed seven cycles of assessment to facilitate practitioners' policy debates and governance. This study reviews PISA-related articles published in English and…

As more states move to universal computer-based assessments, an emergent issue concerns the effect that device type might have on student results. Although, several research studies have explored device effects, most of these studies focused on the differences between tablets and desktops/laptops. In the current study, we distinguish between…

School counselors implement social emotional learning (SEL) programs to support students' holistic development and to prepare them for both academic and personal success. It is imperative that school counselors use evaluation research as they continue to refine their implementation and program selection efforts. This phenomenological qualitative…

This project investigated how Australian Capital Territory (ACT) teachers of physical education (PE) assess games and sports as a Focus Area in the "Australian curriculum health and physical education" (AC: HPE). Figurational sociology, including the concept of habitus was used to inform the study and make sense of the findings. The…

In the fall of 2017, ACT began providing a limited number of supports (also known as accommodations) to English Learner (EL) students in the US taking the ACT® test. The goal of the supports is to remove construct-irrelevant variance in students' scores related to limited English proficiency and allow students to more accurately demonstrate their…

This paper provides an introduction to issues surrounding the participation rights of young people in research and the implications of their growing involvement in research as well as providing a discourse on the ethical implications related to consent. The unique contribution of this paper is that it considers children's rights in respect to the…

Over the past several years, content experts, psychometricians, and researchers have been hard at work developing, refining, and studying the digital SAT. The work is grounded in foundational best practices and advances in measurement and assessment design, with fairness for students informing all of the work done. This paper shares learnings from…

Several large scale assessments include student, teacher, and school background questionnaires. Results from such questionnaires can be reported for each item separately, or as indices based on aggregation of multiple items into a scale. Interpreting scale scores is not always an easy task though. In disseminating results of achievement tests, one…

Due to the unprecedented COVID-19 incident, basic education institutions have faced different challenges in their teaching-learning activities. Particularly conducting assessments remotely during COVID-19 has posed extraordinary challenges for basic education institutions owing to lack of preparation superimposed with the inherent problems of…

Over the last two decades, there has been renewed interest in formative assessment, in large part due to the increasing pressures and prevalence of "high stakes" summative assessments. As states try to meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law, teachers and administrators are realizing that formative assessment offers an…

Inspired by Whitehead and McNiff's "living theory" approach and the "Thinking Schools International" programme, this paper focuses on issues surrounding self-evaluation practices in schools and research aimed at school improvement, with specific consideration given to grounded theory and action research. Specifically, the…

One approach to writing instruction that has been shown to improve secondary students' academic writing without increasing demands on teachers' time is peer review. However, many teachers and students worry that students' feedback and assessment of their peers' writing is less accurate than teachers'. This study investigated whether Advanced…