This study explores the extent to which the difficulty levels of grammar items in an English test can be predicted by the complexity of grammatical structures. The researchers carried out two sets of analyses. In the first analysis, the item facility and item discrimination indices of 175 multiple-choice items were examined. In the second…

The goal of the present study was to address the analytical complexity of incorporating responses and response times through applying the Jeon and De Boeck mixture item response theory model in Mplus 8.7. Using both simulated and real data, we attempt to identify subgroups of responders that are rapid guessers or engage knowledge retrieval…

The Multiple-choice (MC) item format is commonly used in educational assessments due to its economy and effectiveness across a variety of content domains. However, numerous studies have examined the quality of MC items in high-stakes and higher-education assessments and found many flawed items, especially in terms of distractors. These faulty…

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 dissertation explored whether unnecessary linguistic complexity (LC) in mathematics and biology assessment items changes the direction and significance of differential item functioning (DIF) between subgroups emergent bilinguals (EBs) and English proficient students (EPs). Due to inconsistencies in measuring LC in items, Study One adapted a…

Under the framework of item response theory (IRT) and generalizability (G-) theory, this study examined the effects of item difficulty on rating reliability and construct validity on both the constructed-response (CR) items and essay items on English examinations. The data collected for this study were students' scores and responses on the two…

Assessment is a useful process as it provides various stakeholders (e.g., teachers, parents, government, employers) with information about students' competence in a particular subject area. However, for the information generated by assessment to be useful, it needs to support valid inferences. One factor that can undermine the validity of…

Classroom practices, materials and teaching methods in language classes have changed a lot in the last decades and continue to evolve; however, the commonly used techniques to test students' foreign language skills have not changed much regardless of the recent awareness in Bloom's taxonomy. Testing units at schools rely mostly on multiple choice…

The Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova, 2008, 2013) proposes that acquiring properties of the functional morphology is the most challenging part of learning a second language. In the experiment presented here, the predictions of this hypothesis are tested in the second language (L2) English of Norwegian native speakers. Two constructions are…

Purpose: An item analysis of Bishop's (1983) Test for Reception of Grammar (TROG) in its French version (F-TROG; Lecocq, 1996) was conducted to determine whether the difficulty of items is similar for participants with or without intellectual disability (ID). Method: In Study 1, responses to the 92 F-TROG items by 55 participants with Down…

Among several factors affecting the performance of testees on a test is the sequence of the test items. The present study served as an attempt to shed light on the effect of test item sequence on Iranian EFL learners' performance on a test of grammar. To achieve such a purpose, 70 language learners of English at Pooyesh Institute in Shiraz (the…

The Missionary Training Center (MTC), affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, needs a reliable and cost effective way to measure the oral language proficiency of missionaries learning Spanish. The MTC needed to measure incoming missionaries' Spanish language proficiency for training and classroom assignment as well as to…

The usage of "passe compose" and "imparfait" is one of the most challenging topics in French grammar for anglophone learners. Based on the aspect hypothesis formulated by Andersen and Shirai (1994), this study explored the patterns of errors made by higher-ability as opposed to average-ability students and male vs. female students with different…

The "TOEFL Junior"® Standard Test is an assessment that measures the degree to which middle school-aged students learning English as a second language have attained proficiency in the academic and social English skills representative of English-medium instructional environments. The assessment measures skills in three areas: listening…

Some educational contexts almost mandate the application of multiple-choice (MC) testing techniques, even if they are deplored by many practitioners in the field. In such contexts especially, research into how well these types of item perform and how their performance may be characterised is both appropriate and desirable. The focus of this paper…