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…

Foreign language (L2) learners' speaking proficiency is often quantified using two dimensions: intuitive human ratings and analytical, linguistic complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) indices. While previous research and assessment practices have predominantly focused on either the subjective approach to L2 speaking or the objective one, it is…

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…

Girls' education significantly benefits communities and countries. Despite ongoing efforts, gender disparity in developing countries remains a persistent issue. This study aimed to investigate gender disparity in regional and national examinations using an ex-post facto research design. To achieve this, we analyzed the scores of 3,349 students in…

The main objective of the present study was to construct and standardize an achievement test in science for the secondary school science students in grade 8. An achievement test having 120 test items was prepared by the facilitator based on the four main learning objectives of teaching science that are knowledge, understanding, application, and…

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…