The study determines the conceptual understanding levels of primary school students on the concept of light according to the Rasch Model with a Four-tier Light Conceptual Understanding Test (LCUT). The participants were 355 (164 girls and 191 boys) primary school students studying at a public school in Izmir city center. In the study, the Rasch…

This research aimed to investigate animation-based achievement tests according to the item format, psychometric features, students' performance, and gender. The study sample consisted of 52 fifth-grade students in Samsun/Turkey in 2017-2018. Measures of the research were open-ended (OE), animation-based open-ended (AOE), multiple-choice (MC), and…

Stopping rules for fixed-form tests with graduated item difficulty are intended to stop administration of a test at the point where students are sufficiently unlikely to provide a correct response following a pattern of incorrect responses. Although widely employed in fixed-form tests in education, little research has been done to empirically…

Four-parameter models have received increasing psychometric attention in recent years, as a reduced upper asymptote for item characteristic curves can be appealing for measurement applications such as adaptive testing and person-fit assessment. However, applications can be challenging due to the large number of parameters in the model. In this…

This classroom experiment investigates the effects of adding representational pictures to multiple-choice and constructed-response test items to understand the role of the response format for the multimedia effect in testing. Participants were 575 fifth- and sixth-graders who answered 28 science test items--seven items in each of four experimental…

Critical thinking skills are the 21st-century life skills that are needed by students. However, in elementary schools, there are no instruments that are truly effective and efficient to measure critical thinking skills. This research aims to develop an open-ended question assessment instrument to measure students' critical-thinking skills, to test…

This comparative research study examined Grade Five Malaysian Aboriginal pupils' mathematical performance on 30 computation and 20 word problem items in the academic Malay language and community "Temiar" language. The items were constructed in the Malay language before adapting and audio recording into the "Temiar" language…

Diagnostic assessments are intended to support teachers' instructional decision making by providing instructionally relevant information. In this article, we propose that using cognitive theories of learning to design diagnostic assessments can provide teachers with two diagnostic outcomes: (a) the location of a student's thinking within the…

Efficient waste management is a major prerequisite for reaching sustainability as every one of us produces waste. Thus, educational interventions need to offer promising assistance to reduce individual waste as much as possible to promote environmentally friendly behavior beyond stereotypical notions about waste disposal. Those who know about all…

Construct-irrelevant cognitive complexity of some items in the statewide grade-level assessments may impose performance barriers for students with disabilities who are ineligible for alternate assessments based on alternate achievement standards. This has spurred research into whether items can be modified to reduce complexity without affecting…

This study tests a hypothesized learning progression for the concept of energy. It looks at 14 specific ideas under the categories of (i) Energy Forms and Transformations; (ii) Energy Transfer; (iii) Energy Dissipation and Degradation; and (iv) Energy Conservation. It then examines students' growth of understanding within each of these ideas at…

The purpose of this study is to prepare a multiple-choice achievement test with high reliability and validity for the "Let's Solve the Puzzle of Our Body" unit. For this purpose, a multiple choice achievement test consisting of 46 items was applied to 178 fifth grade students in total. As a result of the test and material analysis…

This study presents estimates of Black-White, Hispanic-White, and income achievement gaps using data from two different types of reading and mathematics assessments: constructed-response assessments that were likely more cognitively demanding and state achievement tests that were likely less cognitively demanding (i.e., composed solely or largely…

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is a state-led consortium working to develop next-generation assessments that more accurately, compared to previous assessments, measure student progress toward college and career readiness. The PARCC assessments include both English Language Arts/Literacy (ELA/L) and…

Writing down spoken number words (transcoding) is an ability that is predictive of math performance and related to working memory ability. We analysed these relationships in a large sample of over 25,000 children, from kindergarten to the end of primary school, who solved transcoding items with a computer adaptive system. Furthermore, we…