Assessing the difficulty of reading comprehension questions is crucial to educational methodologies and language understanding technologies. Traditional methods of assessing question difficulty rely frequently on human judgments or shallow metrics, often failing to accurately capture the intricate cognitive demands of answering a question. This…

The purpose of the study reported on in this paper was to design and test multimedia for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) learners. The study focused on counting, addition and subtraction with grade one (age 7) DHH learners in Thailand. The multimedia created for the study was informed by design considerations for DHH learners of arithmetic and…

The article compares three different methods to estimate effects of task characteristics and to use these estimates for model-based proficiency scaling: prediction of item difficulties from the Rasch model, the linear logistic test model (LLTM), and an LLTM including random item effects (LLTM+e). The methods are applied to empirical data from a…

The purpose of this study was to document the instrument development of maze measures for grades 3-8. Each maze passage contained twelve omitted words that students filled in by choosing the best-fit word from among the provided options. In this technical report, we describe the process of creating, reviewing, and pilot testing the maze measures.…

Item banks offer a different approach to test development than that of the more traditional item specification method. This study was designed as an initial comparative investigation in the Area. Fourth grade math and reading tests were developed using both items written from item specifications and items drawn from an existing item bank. Four…

The "Test Development Notebook" is a resource designed for the preparation of tests of literal comprehension for students in grades 1 through 12. This volume contains 200 multiple-choice cloze exercises taken from textbooks in mathematics, and the accompanying answer key. Each exercise carries the code letter of the section to which it belongs.…