Assessments represent an important component of undergraduate courses because they affect how students interact with course content and gauge student achievement of course objectives. To make decisions on assessment design, instructors must understand the affordances and limitations of available question formats. Here, we use a crossover…

Data from 77 ninth-grade Spanish students who took an objective test, a performance assessment, and a measure of perceptions of control indicate that control perceptions predict scores on performance assessments, not objective tests. Performance assessments thus reflect motivational variables beyond the constructs being tested. (SK)

The validity and reliability of two techniques of assessing writing proficiency were compared in a sample of 300 South African students (in Standard 8) for whom English was a second language. The objective, multiple choice method was compared with a subjective, essay method. Students completed a Standard English Second Language Item Bank Test and…