The use of unidimensional scales that contain both positively and negatively worded items is common in both the educational and psychological fields. However, dimensionality investigations of these instruments often lead to a rejection of the theorized unidimensional model in favor of multidimensional structures, leaving researchers at odds for…

The purpose of this study is to develop a valid and reliable scale to assess the level of English usage in daily life by students between 15 and 19 years of age, and to compare these students' scale scores according to their achievement levels in an English course. Five hundred and ninety-five participants were randomly selected from a universe.…

Predicting item difficulty is highly important in education for both teachers and item writers. Despite identifying a large number of explanatory variables, predicting item difficulty remains a challenge in educational assessment with empirical attempts rarely exceeding 25% of variance explained. This paper analyses 216 science items of key stage…

Background: A potential problem of low-stakes large-scale assessments such as the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is low test-taking engagement. The present study pursued two goals in order to better understand conditioning factors of test-taking disengagement: First, a model-based approach was used to…

Research Findings: This study builds on prior work related to the assessment of young dual language learners (DLLs). The purposes of the study were to (a) determine whether latent subgroups of preschool DLLs would replicate those found previously and (b) examine the validity of GOLD® by Teaching Strategies with empirically derived subgroups.…

This study tested how 53 kindergarteners' expressions of depth of vocabulary knowledge and use in novel contexts were related to in-context and out-of-context test formats for 16 target words. Applying multilevel, multi-categorical Logit to all 1,696 test item responses, the authors found that kindergarteners were more likely to express deep…

While it is a well-known fact that speakers of article-less mother tongues, such as Polish, experience problems with articles in English, this study seeks to investigate the problem from a different perspective. Namely, it poses the question of whether the correct use of the article system of the L2 is indeed a purely grammatical task (as it is…

This article describes two research studies conducted on the linguistic modification of test items from K-12 content assessments. In the first study, 120 linguistically modified test items in mathematics and science taken by fourth and sixth graders were found to have a wide range of outcomes for English language learners (ELLs) and non-ELLs, with…

This study examined the "communicativeness" of 22 English language tests designed and administered by 22 English instructors from 22 different colleges and universities in the Philippines. Its key objective was to answer the question "How communicative are the language tests used in assessing students' competence (knowledge of the…

Differential item functioning (DIF) occurs when the responses of students with approximately equal ability differ systematically based on their group membership. Idaho contracted with the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) to provide the Idaho Standards Achievement Tests of reading, language arts and mathematics at grades 4, 8 and 10. The…

With bootstrap methodology, the stability of the Angoff delta item bias index was investigated. Data from item responses of 400 Black and 400 White fifth-grade students taking the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills indicated that the Angoff delta statistic had only moderate stability. (SLD)