This research report provides an overview of the R&D efforts at Educational Testing Service related to its capability for automated scoring of nonnative spontaneous speech with the "SpeechRater"? automated scoring service since its initial version was deployed in 2006. While most aspects of this R&D work have been published in…

Through Many-Facet Rasch analysis, this study explores the rating differences between 1 computer automatic rater and 5 expert teacher raters on scoring 119 students in a computerized English listening-speaking test. Results indicate that both automatic and the teacher raters demonstrate good inter-rater reliability, though the automatic rater…

The Internet and the software stores for mobile devices come with a huge number of digital tools for any task, and those intended for digital formative assessment (DFA) have burgeoned exponentially in the last decade. These tools vary in terms of their functionality, pedagogical quality, cost, operating systems and so forth. Teachers and learners…

The use of corpora and corpus linguistic methods in language testing research is increasing at an accelerated pace. The growing body of language testing research that uses corpus linguistic data is a testament to their utility in test development and validation. Although there are many reasons to be optimistic about the future of using corpus data…

Purpose: Subjective speech intelligibility assessment is often preferred over more objective approaches that rely on transcript scoring. This is, in part, because of the intensive manual labor associated with extracting objective metrics from transcribed speech. In this study, we propose an automated approach for scoring transcripts that provides…

The instructions in this manual explain the responsibilities of school administrators for the New York State Testing Program (NYSTP) Grades 3-8 English Language Arts and Mathematics Tests. School administrators must be thoroughly familiar with the contents of the manual, and the policies and procedures must be followed as written so that testing…

As a branch of artificial intelligence, automated speech recognition (ASR) technology is increasingly used to detect speech, process it to text, and derive the meaning of natural language for various learning and assessment purposes. ASR inaccuracy may pose serious threats to valid score interpretations and fair score use for all when it is…

This article aims to provide a theoretical framework for computerized adaptive tests (CAT) and item response theory models for polytomous items. Besides that, it aims to introduce the simulation and live CAT software to the related researchers. Computerized adaptive test algorithm, assumptions of item response theory models, nominal response…

In this research report, we present an empirical argument for the use of a contributory scoring approach for the 2-essay writing assessment of the analytical writing section of the "GRE"® test in which human and machine scores are combined for score creation at the task and section levels. The approach was designed to replace a currently…

The use of tablets for large-scale testing programs has transitioned from concept to reality for many state testing programs. This study extended previous research on score comparability between tablets and computers with high school students to compare score distributions across devices for reading, math, and science and to evaluate device…

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is an international comparative study of student performance in reading literacy at the fourth grade. PIRLS 2016 marks the fourth iteration of the study, which has been conducted every 5 years since 2001. New to the PIRLS assessment in 2016, ePIRLS provides a computer-based extension to…

This report is the fifth in a series concerning English language proficiency (ELP) assessments for English learners (ELs) in kindergarten through 12th grade in the United States. The series, produced by Educational Testing Service (ETS), is intended to provide theory and evidence-based principles and recommendations for improving next-generation…

The problem of poor writing skills at the postsecondary level is a large and troubling one. This study investigated the writing skills of low-skilled adults attending college developmental education courses by determining whether variables from an automated scoring system were predictive of human scores on writing quality rubrics. The human-scored…

This study investigated the impact of anonymizing text on predicted scores made by two kinds of automated scoring engines: one that incorporates elements of natural language processing (NLP) and one that does not. Eight data sets (N = 22,029) were used to form both training and test sets in which the scoring engines had access to both text and…

Coventry University Institution Wide Language Programme (IWLP) offers beginners language learning modules to approximately 3,000 students. Each module is taught over 11 weeks for a total of one hour and 40 minutes and two of the weeks are used for in class tests, so tutors generally agree that students need to practise their skills outside the…