The purpose of this narrative study was to explore administrator perceptions of their transformational leadership in the classroom learning environment as a domain of T-TESS. Administrators have the responsibility, under T-TESS, to lead and develop leaders who can have a positive impact on the learning environment and student outcomes. T-TESS is a…

To address response style or bias in rating scales, forced-choice items are often used to request that respondents rank their attitudes or preferences among a limited set of options. The rating scales used by raters to render judgments on ratees' performance also contribute to rater bias or errors; consequently, forced-choice items have recently…

Purpose: As the school evaluator's role is multifaceted and the school elevator is the school principal's subordinate, this paper aims to present the school evaluator's complex conduct to achieve a better understanding of his or her functioning. Design/methodology/approach: Theoretical paper. Findings: The two critical dimensions connected to the…

We examined the reliability of grading master's theses at a New Zealand university, where a variant of the academic journal review system is employed. The overall correlation between the grades recommended by internal and external markers of master's theses in psychology and applied psychology at this university was 0.39, which is similar to that…

This research investigates the effects of rater experience on performance ratings in language testing using a systematic review of studies published from 1985 to 2017. Based on a comprehensive literature search of 14 databases, we identified sixteen relevant papers. With these we conducted a narrative review to conceptualize a theoretical…

Peer assessment is a promising solution for scaling up the grading of a large number of submissions. The reliability of evaluations is one of the critical issues in peer assessment; several probabilistic models have been proposed for obtaining reliable grades from peers. Peer correction is a similar framework, in which students are instructed to…

The phenomenon of first impression is well researched in social psychology, but less so in the study of OSCEs and the multiple mini interview (MMI). To explore its bearing on the MMI method we included a rating of first impression in the MMI for student selection executed 2012 at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany (196…

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…

2015 was designated the International Year of Evaluation, suggesting that evaluation has an important role to play in service of positive global ideals. It is vital to recognize the critical role that the education of evaluators plays in these efforts. The current study uses an online search and curricular analysis to provide a snapshot of…

Purpose and Background: Despite the flexibility of multilevel structural equation modeling (MLSEM), a practical limitation many researchers encounter is how to effectively estimate model parameters with typical sample sizes when there are many levels of (potentially disparate) nesting. We develop a method-of-moment corrected maximum likelihood…

Background: Competency models provide useful frameworks for organizing learning and assessment programs, but their construction is both time intensive and subject to perceptual biases. Some aspects of model development may be particularly well-suited to automation, specifically natural language processing (NLP), which could also help make them…

Automated essay scoring (AES) has emerged as a secondary or as a sole marker for many high-stakes educational assessments, in native and non-native testing, owing to remarkable advances in feature engineering using natural language processing, machine learning, and deep-neural algorithms. The purpose of this study is to compare the effectiveness…

Summary writing is essential for academic success, and has attracted renewed interest in academic research and large-scale language test. However, less attention has been paid to the development and evaluation of the scoring scales of summary writing. This study reports on the validation of a summary rubric that represented an approach to scale…

Raters vary from each other in their severity and leniency in rating performance. This study examined the factors affecting rater severity in peer assessments of oral presentations in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), focusing on peer raters' self-construal and presentation abilities. Japanese university students enrolled in EFL classes…

In this article, I report on examiners' views and experiences of using Pairwise Comparative Judgement (PCJ) and Rank Ordering (RO) as alternatives to traditional analytical marking for GCSE English Language essays. Fifteen GCSE English Language examiners took part in the study. After each had judged 100 pairs of essays using PCJ and eight packs of…