Effective educational measurement relies heavily on the curation of well-designed item pools. However, item calibration is time consuming and costly, requiring a sufficient number of respondents to estimate the psychometric properties of items. In this study, we explore the potential of six different large language models (LLMs; GPT-3.5, GPT-4,…

This paper informs users of data collected in international large-scale assessments (ILSA), by presenting argumentsunderlining the importance of considering two design features employed in these studies. We examine a commonmisconception stating that the uncertainty arising from the assessment design is negligible compared with that arisingfrom the…

Introduction: The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) reviews rigorous research on educational interventions with a goal of identifying "what works" and making that information accessible to educators and policymakers. The WWC has historically prioritized internal validity over external validity in rating the quality of research. One critique…

In recent years, harmonic regression models have been applied to implement quality control for educational assessment data consisting of multiple administrations and displaying seasonality. As with other types of regression models, it is imperative that model adequacy checking and model fit be appropriately conducted. However, there has been no…

Policymakers have grown increasingly interested in how experimental results may generalize to a larger population. However, recently developed propensity score-based methods are limited by small sample sizes, where the experimental study is generalized to a population that is at least 20 times larger. This is particularly problematic for methods…

Recent methods to improve generalizations from nonrandom samples typically invoke assumptions such as the strong ignorability of sample selection, which is challenging to meet in practice. Although researchers acknowledge the difficulty in meeting this assumption, point estimates are still provided and used without considering alternative…

Recent policy suggestions from the European Community underlined the importance of "efficiency" and "equity" in the provision of education while, at the same time, the European countries are required to provide their educational services by minimizing the amount of public money devoted to them. In this article, an empirical…

Although International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement-pioneered international large-scale assessment (ILSA) of education is now a well-established science, non-practitioners and many users often substantially misunderstand how large-scale assessments are conducted, what questions and challenges they are designed to…

In this article, the authors review International Large-Scale Assessment (ILSA)-based research over the last several decades, with specific attention on cross-national analysis of mean differences between and variation within countries in mathematics education. They discuss the role of sampling design and "opportunity to learn" (OTL)…

In large-scale assessments, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), plausible values based on Multiple Imputations (MI) have been used to estimate population characteristics for latent constructs under complex sample designs. Mislevy (1991) derived a closed-form analytic solution for a fixed-effect model in creating…

Georgia has one of the few state-funded universal pre-kindergarten programs in the United States, with the aim of providing pre-k services to all 4-year-olds whose families want their children to participate in the program, regardless of family income level. In the 2011-2012 school year, Georgia's Pre-K Program served a total of over 94,000…

Test equating is a statistical procedure for adjusting for test form differences in difficulty in a standardized assessment. Equating results are supposed to hold for a specified target population (Kolen & Brennan, 2004; von Davier, Holland, & Thayer, 2004) and to be (relatively) independent of the subpopulations from the target population (see…

Georgia has one of the few state-funded universal pre-kindergarten programs in the United States, with the aim of providing pre-k services to all 4-year-olds whose families want their children to participate in the program, regardless of family income level. In the 2011-2012 school year, Georgia's Pre-K Program served a total of over 94,000…

Over the past decade, international development agencies have begun to emphasize the improvement of the quality (rather than simply quantity) of education in developing countries. This new focus has been paralleled by a significant increase in the use of educational assessments as a way to measure gains and losses in quality. As this interest in…

This phenomenographic study attempts to explicit science and technology teachers' views of primary school science and technology curriculum. Participants of the study were selected through opportunistic sampling and consisted of 30 science and technology teachers teaching in primary schools in Afyonkarahisar, Turkey. Data were collected through an…