The significance of the role of students' interpretation and creation of multiple forms of representation in science learning has long been established and advocated, but there is a paucity of research into the extent to which this emphasis in science education is reflected in high stakes final year high school science examinations. This study…

The multiple-choice section of the final examination for the first-year Advanced Physics I course at the University of Newcastle, Australia between 2010 and 2018 was investigated for gender bias. A Mantel-Haenszel analysis revealed that approximately 20% of the multiple-choice questions exhibited statistically significant gender bias. A schema for…

Child observation is a critical component of quality pedagogy in early childhood education and care (ECEC). The ORICL (Observe, Reflect, Improve Children's Learning) tool was co-designed by ECEC researchers, policymakers, leaders, and practitioners to support this work. Educators rate the experiences of individual children, and responses of…

Progressing from additive to multiplicative thinking is a key outcome of school mathematics, making ratios an essential topic of study in junior secondary. In this study, 15 Australian Year 8 students were administered a ratio test followed by semi-structured interviews to explore their conceptions of ratio prior to formal instruction. In this…

The aim of this study is to investigate the cross-cultural measurement invariance of the reading skills items of the PISA 2018 at test and item level. Another aim of the study is to determine the item bias for items that do not show cross-cultural measurement invariance in line with expert opinions. A survey model was used in the study. The study…

Data from international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) of schooled populations indicate that boys have considerably poorer literacy skills than girls. New evidence from a household-based ILSA--Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)--indicates that the gender gap in literacy is negligible, even though…

This article presents preliminary analysis of a test item in a large-scale study design to promote the development of geometric reasoning progression. Two sets of data were analysed to validate the item designed to assess secondary school students' knowledge of a rectangle. The first data set involved 155 Year 4-10 students from seven trial…

The development and evaluation of valid assessments of scientific reasoning are an integral part of research in science education. In the present study, we used the linear logistic test model (LLTM) to analyze how item features related to text complexity and the presence of visual representations influence the overall item difficulty of an…

During the development of a test of multiple-choice items, cognitive interviews were conducted with students from lower secondary school. The purpose of these interviews was to confirm that the prospective respondents' interpretation of mathematics test items was consistent with the interpretation intended by the item writer. The conversations…

In large-scale low-stake assessment such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), students may skip items (missingness) which are within their ability to complete. The detection and taking care of these noneffortful responses, as a measure of test-taking motivation, is an important issue in modern psychometric models.…

Making accurate judgements and interpretations about student growth and progress in mathematics can be problematic when using open-ended assessments. This study reports on the development of a class-based assessment instrument and marking key designed to assess Year 2 students' mathematics competence to reflect their learning of mathematics…

Objective: This study reports on the operationalization and testing of the newly developed Relationship Quality (RQ) scale, designed to assess an individual's perception of his or her RQ in their current partnership. Methods: Data were generated through extended sampling from an original U.K.-based research project, "Enduring Love? Couple…

While research on online tests in higher education is steadily growing, there is little evidence in the literature of the use of learning management systems (LMS), such as Blackboard™, as rich sources of data on online tests practices. This paper reports on an investigation that used data from Blackboard™ LMS to gain insight into the purpose for…

Settings-based approaches have become an increasing health promotion focus since the World Health Organization's 1986 Ottawa Charter. While schools, cities, and prisons have implemented this approach, its development within sports environments is recent. Sports are a popular leisure-time activity, requiring validated tools to measure health…

The Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency -- Second Edition (BOT-2) is a commonly used assessment of children's skills. It is important that assessments have validity evidence reported about them. The objective of the study was to investigate the structural validity of the BOT-2's eight subscales and four composite scales. A sample of 117…