Despite growing interest in the studies on Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), its operation in the forms of individualized and group-wide has been controversial. To cast some empirical light on the issue, this study was designed to study the applicability of the two scenarios of ZPD-based instructions to the writing accuracy of two levels of…

Purpose: This study reports the psychometric development of the Cantonese versions of the English Computerized Revised Token Test (CRTT) for persons with aphasia (PWAs) and healthy controls (HCs). Method: The English CRTT was translated into standard Chinese for the Reading--Word Fade version (CRTT-R-[subscript WF]-Cantonese) and into formal…

The parasitic model proposes that novel words in L3 learning will build parasitic connections to already learned words that share orthographic or phonological similarities. This accounts for little in terms of the connections between words that share very few similarities. The present study explored the parasitic connections of L3 word concepts to…

Most research into second language (L2) writing has focused on the products of writing tasks; much less empirical work has examined the behaviours in which L2 writers engage and the cognitive processes that underlie writing behaviours. We aimed to fill this gap by investigating the extent to which writing speed fluency, pausing, eye-gaze…

Electronic Assessment (E-Assessment) also known as computer aided assessment for the purposes involving diagnostic, formative or summative examining using data analysis. Digital assessments come commonly from social, academic, and adaptive learning in machine readable forms to deliver the machine scoring function. To achieve real-time and smart…

This paper is based on an on-going project for modernizing the basic education in mathematics for engineers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. One of the components in the project is using a computer-aided assessment system (Maple T.A.) for handling students' weekly hand-ins. Successful completion of a certain number of problem…

There has been an increased interest in the impact of unmotivated test taking on test performance and score validity. This has led to the development of new ways of measuring test-taking effort based on item response time. In particular, Response Time Effort (RTE) has been shown to provide an assessment of effort down to the level of individual…

Computer-based assessments have considerable potential in assessment. This study explores the perceptions of 500 post-graduate students, noting gender differences where appropriate, in relation to the role of computer applications in formative assessment. Using questionnaires and interviews, the data reveal that the student perceptions of the role…

Exams assessment is one of the most tedious work for university teachers all over the world. Multiple choice theses make exams assessment a little bit easier, but the teacher cannot prepare more than 3-4 variants; in this case, the possibility of students for cheating from one another becomes a risk for "objective assessment outcome." On…

Open-ended tasks are common in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. However, as far as we know, no tools have been developed to assist in the assessment of the solution process of open-ended questions. In this paper, we propose the use of analysis of traces as a tool to address this need. To illustrate this approach,…

The divisibility of the reading has led many researchers to examine whether reading construct is a unitary skill that cannot be divided into separate sub-skills, or it is composed of underlying components. In these studies, however, participants have generally been located in a product-oriented testing environment where their actual reading…

In this research report, we describe the design and empirical findings for a large-scale study of essay writing ability with approximately 2,500 high school students in Germany and Switzerland on the basis of 2 tasks with 2 associated prompts, each from a standardized writing assessment whose scoring involved both human and automated components.…

The paper reports the results of a phenomenographic study on academics' conceptions of e-assessment. A cohort of 21 academics from 17 disciplines participated in semi-structured interviews exploring their experiences of using web-based technologies for formative and summative assessment purposes. Through iterative analysis of the interview…

Critical thinking, problem solving and communication are fundamental elements of undergraduate education, but methods for assessing these skills across an institution are susceptible to logistical, motivational and financial issues. Queen's University conducted two research studies investigating the use of standardised tests to assess cognitive…

The interest in, and use of, computers and software for assessment is reported to be increasingly popular via electronic examinations (e-exams). We deepen our understanding of the design, reception, and effectiveness of e-exams for history and philosophy of science modules, undertaken by first-year advanced science and medical science students at…