Designing and constructing pedagogical tests that contain items (i.e. questions) which measure various types of skills for different levels of students equitably is a challenging task. Teachers and item writers alike need to ensure that the quality of assessment materials is consistent, if student evaluations are to be objective and effective.…

Assessing the difficulty of reading comprehension questions is crucial to educational methodologies and language understanding technologies. Traditional methods of assessing question difficulty rely frequently on human judgments or shallow metrics, often failing to accurately capture the intricate cognitive demands of answering a question. This…

Background: Multiple-choice item (MCI) assessments are burdensome for instructors to develop. Artificial intelligence (AI, e.g., ChatGPT) can streamline the process without sacrificing quality. The quality of AI-generated MCIs and human experts is comparable. However, whether the quality of AI-generated MCIs is equally good across various domain-…

Cognitive learning complexity identification of assessment questions is an essential task in the domain of education, as it helps both the teacher and the learner to discover the thinking process required to answer a given question. Bloom's Taxonomy cognitive levels are considered as a benchmark standard for the classification of cognitive…

This study aimed to reveal the differences in individuals' abilities, their standard errors, and the psychometric properties of the test according to the two methods of applying the test (electronic and paper). The descriptive approach was used to achieve the study's objectives. The study sample consisted of 74 male and female students at the…

The biology education literature includes compelling assertions that unfamiliar problems are especially useful for revealing students' true understanding of biology. However, there is only limited evidence that such novel problems have different cognitive requirements than more familiar problems. Here, we sought additional evidence by using…

In data collected from virtual learning environments (VLEs), item response theory (IRT) models can be used to guide the ongoing measurement of student ability. However, such applications of IRT rely on unbiased item parameter estimates associated with test items in the VLE. Without formal piloting of the items, one can expect a large amount of…

The digital transformation in educational assessment has led to the proliferation of large-scale data, offering unprecedented opportunities to enhance language learning, and testing through machine learning (ML) techniques. Drawing on the extensive data generated by online English language assessments, this dissertation investigates the efficacy…

Developing effective assessments is a critical component of quality instruction. Assessments are effective when they are well-aligned with the learning outcomes, can confirm that all intended learning outcomes are attained, and their obtained grades are accurately reflecting the level of student achievement. Developing effective assessments is not…

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have the potential to reduce the workload for the second language (L2) teachers and test developers. We propose two AI distractor-generating methods for creating Chinese vocabulary items: semantic similarity and visual similarity. Semantic similarity refers to antonyms and synonyms, while visual similarity…

This research applies multimedia technology to design a dynamic item generation method that can adaptively adjust the difficulty level of items according to the level of the testee. The method is based on interactive testing software developed by Flash Actionscript, and provides a testing solution for users by automatically distributing items of…

This article reports the results of using a three-layer back propagation artificial neural network to predict item difficulty in a reading comprehension test. Three classes of variables were examined: text structure, propositional analysis, and cognitive demand. Results demonstrate that the networks can consistently predict item difficulty. (JL)

Recent assessment research joining cognitive psychology and psychometric theory has introduced a new technology, item generation. In algorithmic item generation, items are systematically created based on specific combinations of features that underlie the processing required to correctly solve a problem. Reading comprehension items have been more…

This report explores an approach to item development and psychometric modeling which explicitly incorporates knowledge about the mental models used by examinees in the solution of items into a psychometric model that characterize performances on a test, as well as incorporating that knowledge into the item development process. The paper focuses on…

The 4th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2011) brings together researchers from computer science, education, psychology, psychometrics, and statistics to analyze large datasets to answer educational research questions. The conference, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, July 6-9, 2011, follows the three previous editions…