Written answers to open-ended questions can have a higher long-term effect on learning than multiple-choice questions. However, it is critical that teachers immediately review the answers, and ask to redo those that are incoherent. This can be a difficult task and can be time-consuming for teachers. A possible solution is to automate the detection…

Culturally bounded in nature, adaptive behavior is the degree to which a person meets the requirements of personal independence and social responsibilities. This study aimed to develop a computerized adaptive test (CAT) of a culturally appropriate adaptive behavior measure (i.e., the Activities and Participation Rating Scale [APRS]) in the…

Analyses that reveal how treatment effects vary allow researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to better understand the efficacy of educational interventions. In practice, however, standard statistical methods for addressing heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) fail to address the HTE that may exist "within" outcome measures. In…

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) has been monitoring international trends in reading achievement among fourth-grade students for 25 years. As a critical point in a student's education, the fourth year of schooling establishes the foundations of literacy, with reading becoming increasingly central to learning across all…

Researchers often develop instruments using correctness scores (and a variety of theories and techniques, such as Item Response Theory) for validation and scoring. Less frequently, observations of children's strategies are incorporated into the design, development, and application of assessments. We conducted individual interviews of 833…

Creativity is highly valued in both education and the workforce, but assessing and developing creativity can be difficult without psychometrically robust and affordable tools. The open-ended nature of creativity assessments has made them difficult to score, expensive, often imprecise, and therefore impractical for school- or district-wide use. To…

The relationship between mathematics and spatial reasoning is well established and extensively researched. Certain mathematics content could be deemed explicitly spatial, for example within geometry. However, the link to spatial reasoning extends into other areas of mathematics, such as representations of the number line and reading and…

Analyses that reveal how treatment effects vary allow researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to better understand the efficacy of educational interventions. In practice, however, standard statistical methods for addressing Heterogeneous Treatment Effects (HTE) fail to address the HTE that may exist within outcome measures. In this study, we…

Computer-based, pop-up glossaries are perhaps the most promising accommodation aimed at mitigating the influence of linguistic structure and cultural bias on the performance of English Learner (EL) students on statewide assessments. To date, there is no established procedure for identifying the words that require a glossary for EL students that is…

One of the most common technology-enhanced items used in large-scale K-12 testing programs is the drag-and-drop response interaction. The main research questions in this study are: (a) Does adding a drag-and-drop interface to an online test affect the accuracy of student performance? (b) Does adding a drag-and-drop interface to an online test…

With the widespread use of technology in the assessment field, many testing programs use both computer-based tests (CBTs) and paper-and-pencil tests (PPTs). Both the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA, & NCME, 2014) and the International Guidelines on Computer-Based and Internet Delivered Testing (International Test…

The Computer-based Orthographic Processing Assessment (COPA) is a newly developed assessment to measure orthographic processing skills, including rapid perception, access, differentiation, correction, and arrangement. In this study, cognitive diagnostic models were used to test if the dimensionality of the COPA conforms to theoretical expectation,…

Studies have shown that item difficulty can vary significantly based on the context of an item within a test form. In particular, item position may be associated with practice and fatigue effects that influence item parameter estimation. The purpose of this research was to examine the relevance of item position specifically for assessments used in…

This study explored the interplay between content knowledge and reading ability in a large-scale multistage adaptive English for academic purposes (EAP) reading assessment at a range of ability levels across 1-12 graders. The datasets for this study were item-level responses to the reading tests of ACCESS for ELLs Online 2.0. A sample of 10,000…

The present contribution aims at presenting an assessment tool (i.e., the TALK-assessment) built to evaluate the language development and school readiness of Italian preschoolers before they enter primary school, and its predictive validity for the children's reading and writing skills at the end of the first year of primary school. The early…