In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) has been for the last 35 years the most common qualification by which students' attainment at age 16 has been measured. The range and balance of processes by which the GCSEs' programmes of study have been assessed have varied over the decades, to include…

The author provides a checklist for educators who are selecting technically adequate tests for identifying and referring students for gifted education services and programs. The checklist includes questions related to how the test was normed, reliability and validity studies as well as questions related to types of scores, administration, and…

Assuring the quality of education is a concern of learning institutions. To do so, it is necessary to have assertive learning management, with consistent data on students' outcomes. This research provides associate deans and researchers, a roadmap with which to gather evidence to improve the quality of open-ended assessments. Based on statistical…

In the last twenty-five years, the discussion surrounding validity evidence has shifted both in language and scope, from the work of Messick and Kane to the updated Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. However, these discussions haven't necessarily focused on best practices for different types of instruments or assessments, taking…

This research goal to develop a multiple-choice closed-ended test to assessing and evaluate students' digital literacy skills. The sample in this study were students at MTsN 1 Blitar City who were selected using a purposive sampling technique. The test was also validated by experts, namely 2 Doctors of Physics and Science from Yogyakarta State…

Assessment is an integral part of any teaching learning process. Assessment has large number of functions to perform, whether it is formative or summative. This paper analyse the issues involved and the areas of concern in the classroom assessment practice and discusses the recent reforms take place. [This paper was published in Edutracks v20 n8…

Vocabulary learning is an incremental process. Vocabulary knowledge, especially for second-language learners, may develop across a lifetime. Teachers with experience in providing feedback on their students' vocabulary use in writing or speech might have noticed that it is sometimes difficult to pinpoint one aspect of word knowledge. The reason is…

Originally designed for students in Grades 3 through 5, MOCCA (formerly the Multiple-choice Online Causal Comprehension Assessment), identifies students who struggle with comprehension, and helps uncover why they struggle. There are many reasons why students might not comprehend what they read. They may struggle with decoding, or reading words…

We introduce a specific type of item for knowledge tests, confidence-weighted true-false (CTF) items, and review experiences of its application in psychology courses. A CTF item is a statement about the learning content to which students respond whether the statement is true or false, and they rate their confidence level. Previous studies using…

There have been calls in the literature for changes to assessment practices in higher education, to increase flexibility and give learners more control over the assessment process. This article explores the possibilities of allowing student choice in the format used to present their work, as a starting point for changing assessment, based on…

In this article the issues of validity and reliability in the assessment of the learning outcomes of WIL curricula are considered. An argument is made that there are three classes of learning outcome for WIL curricula: experience of the work-world; the development or refinement of skills; and the application of disciplinary knowledge in work…

"Scientific argumentation," defined as the ability to develop and analyze scientific claims, support claims with evidence from investigations of the natural world, and explain and evaluate the reasoning that connects the evidence to the claim, is a critical component of current science standards and is consistent with "Common Core…

This article considers the design process for new formative history assessments. Over the course of 3 years, my colleagues from the Stanford History Education Group and I designed, piloted, and revised dozens of "History Assessments of Thinking" (HATs). As we created HATs, we sought to gather information about their cognitive validity,…

This article presents and analyses a classroom-based assessment method to test students' speaking skills in a variety of professional settings in tourism. The assessment system has been implemented in the Communication in English for Tourism course, as part of the Tourism Management degree programme, at Florida Universitaria (affiliated to the…

Creating a fair, reliable, teacher-made test is a challenge. Every year poorly designed tests fail to accurately measure many students' learning--and negatively affect their academic futures. Salend, a well-known writer on assessment for at-risk students who consults with schools on assessment procedures, offers guidelines for creating tests that…