Students in England sit an important gateway examination in English at age 16. Major changes were made to this exam in 2017 resulting in more emphasis on the comprehension of unseen literary texts. This paper uses corpus linguistic methods to identify the kind of vocabulary encountered in these exam texts and compares it to the kind of vocabulary…

The performance of standardized tests is an ongoing matter of concern for childhood researchers. Standardized tests are often described as neglecting the ethical complexities of doing research with young children. However, this critique is primarily presented in general terms, and does not attend to the locality and specificity of particular test…

Dutch secondary education is a multi-tiered system, and many students are placed in a single track in the first year (seventh grade) of secondary education. As part of the placement procedure, all sixth-grade students take an end of primary school test. Although these standardised attainment tests (SATs) are considered high-stakes tests, the…

Dynamic testing, though underutilized, holds potential for assessing learning and instructional needs. However, its limited adoption is often attributed to the perceived time and labor-intensive nature of its administration. This study explores the viability of a training-only dynamic test (ToDT) with a standardized procedure to identify…

The role of mathematics in secondary-tertiary transition is subject to increasing analysis in several education contexts. We explore the longitudinal relationships among a standardized test used for assessing secondary school mathematics, high school final grades and the academic progress of a sample of Italian undergraduates. Results from…

A growing number of primary school students experience difficulties with grapho-motor skills involved in handwriting, which impact both form and content of their texts. Therefore, it is important to assess and monitor handwriting skills in primary school via standardized tests and detect specific grapho-motor parameters (GMPs) which impact…

Objective-Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) are a valuable source of assessment for students' practical clinical and professional skills throughout their medical careers due to the OSCEs' capability to test multiple competencies in a standardized manner. Over the years, OSCEs have increasingly been integrated across medical programs to…

Based on the theoretical approaches of social capital and institutional trust, this paper seeks to identify contextual factors and conditions behind teacher behaviours which aim to alter the results of standardised tests in the Italian low-stakes accountability system. Numerous studies report significant factors associated with student cheating,…

The German national educational standards state explicitly that students should be enabled to successfully interact with dynamic geometry software. In a feasibility study on providing a standardized assessment instrument by digital means, in order to assess students' mathematical competencies, the implementation of a task with such a dynamic…

In this paper, we set out to explore the world's first major standardised examination system. In the field of language testing and assessment, works such as measured words (Spolsky, 1995), measured constructs (Weir, Vidakovic & Galaczi, 2013), and Cambridge English exams -- the first hundred years (Hawkey & Milanovic, 2013) all point to…

Formative Assessment (FA) is a promising teaching practice for supporting students' learning at school. However, implementing FA into teaching (mathematics) is challenging, effects of implementation of FA vary between empirical studies. Therefore, recent studies additionally consider instructional quality of teaching when analyzing effects of FA…

Small rural schools utilize multi-graded classes to maintain their viability. When the majority of classes are combined, the result is a multi-graded school. In Alberta alone, there are approximately 90 schools that would be defined as a multi-graded school, and every rural school board has at least one on its roster. In Alberta, students and…

This paper aims to map and understand tactics and practices of resistance to standardised testing in England by focusing on the "More Than a Score" (MTAS) campaign. More specifically, this paper examines the role of professional organisations affiliated to the MTAS campaign in the production and mobilisation of expert knowledge as a tool…

Without standardized tests, college admissions may reward high schools' reputation over effectiveness--a phenomenon we study in Peru. We first estimate the impact of selective public exam schools on college outcomes by leveraging the admissions mechanism in a single- and multiple-offers RDD. Despite no conclusive evidence of learning gains,…

The results of total testing from the years 2015-2022 on the mathematical and verbal achievement of Lithuanian pupils (N [approximately equal to] 250,000) are presented. These are the standardised tests from grades 4 to 12. The K-Means method has discovered six types of achievement. The highest achievement type is dominated by girls (61.1%) who…