Unfolding models are frequently used to develop scales for measuring attitudes. Recently, unfolding models have been applied to examine rater severity and accuracy within the context of rater-mediated assessments. One of the problems in applying unfolding models to rater-mediated assessments is that the substantive interpretations of the latent…

The current paper intends to exploit the Many Facet Rasch Model to investigate and compare the impact of situations (items) and raters on test takers' performance on the Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) and Discourse Self-Assessment Tests (DSAT). In this study, the participants were 110 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students at…

Recent research on rater effects in performance assessments has increasingly focused on rater centrality, the tendency to assign scores clustering around the rating scale's middle categories. In the present paper, we adopted Jin and Wang's (2018) extended facets modeling approach and constructed a centrality continuum, ranging from raters…

This study aims to examine whether differences exist in the factors influencing the difficulty of scoring English summaries and determining scores based on the raters' attributes, and to collect candid opinions, considerations, and tentative suggestions for future improvements to the analytic rubric of summary writing for English learners. In this…

Background: Multiple-choice item (MCI) assessments are burdensome for instructors to develop. Artificial intelligence (AI, e.g., ChatGPT) can streamline the process without sacrificing quality. The quality of AI-generated MCIs and human experts is comparable. However, whether the quality of AI-generated MCIs is equally good across various domain-…

Assessing integrated reading-into-writing task performances is known to be challenging, and analytic rating scales have been found to better facilitate the scoring of these performances than other common types of rating scales. However, little is known about how specific operationalizations of the reading-into-writing construct in analytic rating…

We investigated the relationship between the scores assigned by an Automated Essay Scoring (AES) system, the Intelligent Essay Assessor (IEA), and grades allocated by trained, professional human raters to English essay writing by instigating two procedures novel to written-language assessment: the logistic transformation of AES raw scores into…

Elicited Imitation Tests (EITs) are commonly used in second language acquisition (SLA)/bilingualism research contexts to assess the general oral proficiency of study participants. While previous studies have provided valuable EIT construct-related validity evidence, some key gaps remain. This study uses an integrative data analysis to further…

An Angoff standard setting study generally yields judgments on a number of items by a number of judges (who may or may not be nested in panels). Variability associated with judges (and possibly panels) contributes error to the resulting cut score. The variability associated with items plays a more complicated role. To the extent that the mean item…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to review the issues and challenges associated with examining PhD theses in the modern, rapidly changing academic world. The PhD degree has been described as the "pinnacle of academic qualifications", but it is under threat in terms of the quality of supervision and the outcome of examinations. By…

Teachers who can adapt and be ready for all changes will also be able to provide a balance to increase the competence of vocational high school students. This is also not denied when teachers become assessors in student competency tests. The objectives of this study were to produce an instrument for the readiness of teachers as assessors; to…

This study investigated the effectiveness of statistical adjustments applied to rater bias in many-facet Rasch analysis. Some changes were first made in the dataset that did not include "rater × examinee" bias to cause to have "rater × examinee" bias. Later, bias adjustment was applied to rater bias included in the data file,…

This study describes the development of a special education teacher observation protocol detailing the elements of effective decoding instruction. The psychometric properties of the protocol were investigated through many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM). Video observations of classroom decoding instruction from 20 special education teachers across…

The Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) is a high stakes summative assessment that was designed to measure pre-service teacher readiness. We examined the inter-rater reliability (IRR) of trained PACT evaluators who rated 19 candidates. As measured by Cohen's weighted kappa, the overall IRR estimate was 0.17 (poor strength of…

The study investigated the alignment process of the International English Language Competency Assessment (IELCA) suite examinations' four levels, B1, B2, C1 and C2, onto the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) by explaining and discussing the five linking stages (Council of Europe (CoE 2009). Unlike previous studies, this study used the…