Assessing students' (mis)conceptions is a challenging task for teachers as well as for researchers. While individual assessment, for example through interviews, can provide deep insights into students' thinking, this is very time-consuming and therefore not feasible for whole classes or even larger settings. For those settings, automatically…

As educational systems move from onsite to online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers face the difficulty of designing online examination formats which minimize opportunities for dishonesty. In this paper, we expose our design of such a format: a protected Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing short-answer questions, which was implemented in a…

Formative assessment benefits both students and teaching academics. In particular, formative assessment in mathematics subjects enables both students and teaching academics to assess individual performance and understanding through students' responses. Over the last decade, educational technologies and learning management systems (LMSs) are used…

The purpose of this research is to provide information about the psychometric properties of technology-enhanced (TE) items and the effects these items have on the content validity of an assessment. Specifically, this research investigated the impact that the inclusion of TE items has on the construct of a mathematics test, the technical properties…

The purpose of this research is to develop a multidimensional computerized adaptive test for diagnosing the cognitive process of grade 7 students in learning algebra by applying multidimensional item response theory. The research is divided into 4 steps: 1) the development of item bank of algebra, 2) the development of the multidimensional…

The initial development of a testlet-based algebra test was previously reported (Wainer and Lewis, 1990). This account provides the details of this excursion into the use of hierarchical testlets and validity-based scoring. A pretest of two 15-item hierarchical testlets was carried out in which examinees' performance on a 4-item subset of each…

Lowering the dropout rate of incoming mathematics and science students, and enhancing the provision of mathematics support for freshmen are two important aims of the University of Amsterdam. The approach recently adopted to support first year students is to set up a diagnostic pretest and posttest and use these tests to identify students being at…

This study evaluated expert system diagnoses of examinees' solutions to complex constructed-response algebra word problems. Problems were presented to three samples (30 college students each), each of which had taken the Graduate Record Examinations General Test. One sample took the problems in paper-and-pencil form and the other two on computer.…

The strategies examinees employ when making item difficulty level choices in self-adapted computerized testing were investigated. Subjects were 148 college students (88 females and 60 males) in an introductory statistics course. The primary instrument was a self-adapted computerized algebra test used to measure student readiness for the statistics…

One question regarding the utility of adaptive testing is the effect of individualized item arrangements on examinee test scores. The purpose of this study was to analyze the item difficulty choices by examinees as a function of previous item performance. The examination was a 25-item test of basic algebra skills given to 36 students in an…