Nursing students struggle to retain enough anatomical knowledge to meet their entry to practice competencies, but what knowledge is missing and when this occurs has been previously unexplored. A cohort of 80 nursing students were given multiple choice quizzes to assess their anatomical knowledge on 11 different organ systems during their second,…

When determining the score given to candidates in multiple mini-interview (MMI) stations, raters have to translate a narrative judgment to an ordinal rating scale. When adding individual scores to calculate final ranking, it is generally presumed that the values of possible scores on the evaluation grid are separated by constant intervals,…

Several states in the US have removed time limits on their state assessments. In Indiana, where this study takes place, the state assessment is both untimed during the testing window and allows unlimited breaks during the testing session. Using grade 3 and 8 math and English state assessment data, in this paper we focus on time used for testing…

The practice assignments in a mathematics textbook or course can be arranged so that most of the problems relating to any particular concept are massed together in a single assignment, or these related problems can be distributed across many assignments--a format known as spaced practice. Here we report the results of two classroom experiments…

The practice assignments in a mathematics textbook or course can be arranged so that most of the problems relating to any particular concept are massed together in a single assignment, or these related problems can be distributed across many assignments -- a format known as spaced practice. Here we report the results of two classroom experiments…

Objective: When students learn or solve problems, attentional resources are depleted; rest breaks may restore cognitive functioning in support of learning. Research framed by attention restoration theory holds that exposure to natural environments may be another means to restore attentional resources. The study investigated the effects of…

This note highlights and illustrates the links between item response theory and classical test theory in the context of polytomous items. An item response modeling procedure is discussed that can be used for point and interval estimation of the individual true score on any item in a measuring instrument or item set following the popular and widely…

A typical mathematics assignment consists of one or two dozen practice problems relating to the same skill or concept, yet empirical evidence suggests that there is little or no long-term benefit from working more than a few problems of the same kind in immediate succession. Alternatively, randomized experiments in the laboratory and classroom…

Reporting confidence intervals with test scores helps test users make important decisions about examinees by providing information about the precision of test scores. Although a variety of estimation procedures based on the binomial error model are available for computing intervals for test scores, these procedures assume that items are randomly…

In this study, we explored retest effects on test scores and response time for repeaters, examinees who retake an examination. We looked at two groups of repeaters: those who took the same form twice and those who took different forms on their two attempts for a certification and licensure test. Scores improved over the two test attempts, and…

The last three decades have seen an increase of tests aimed at measuring an individual's vocabulary level or size. The target words used in these tests are typically sampled from word frequency lists, which are in turn based on language corpora. Conventionally, test developers sample items from frequency bands of 1000 words; different tests employ…

The performance of various classical test theory (CTT) item discrimination estimators has been compared in the literature using both empirical and simulated data, resulting in mixed results regarding the preference of some discrimination estimators over others. This study analyzes the performance of various item discrimination estimators in CTT:…

The uncertainty arising from item parameter estimation is often not negligible and must be accounted for when calculating latent variable (LV) scores in item response theory (IRT). It is particularly so when the calibration sample size is limited and/or the calibration IRT model is complex. In the current work, we treat two-stage IRT scoring as a…

This article offers an approach to examining differential item functioning (DIF) under its item response theory (IRT) treatment in the framework of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The approach is based on integrating IRT- and CFA-based testing of DIF and using bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals with a syntax code in Mplus.

Note taking has been categorized as a two-stage process: the recording of notes and the review of notes. We contend that note taking might best involve a three-stage process where the missing stage is revision. This study investigated the benefits of revising lecture notes and addressed two questions: First, is revision more effective than…