Volunteer college students were assigned to one of six computer administered vocabulary tests, one half with immediate knowledge of results (KR) after responding to each item, and the other half without knowledge of results. The six tests were designed to be at one of three levels of difficulty and consisted either of 50 preselected items…

This report examines how selection fairness is influenced by the characteristics of a selection instrument in terms of its distribution of item difficulties, level of item discrimination, degree of item bias, and testing strategy. Computer simulation was used in the administration of either a conventional or Bayesian adaptive ability test to a…

Two types of computer-administered unit quizzes in a systematic pathology course for second-year medical students were compared. Quizzes composed of questions selected on the basis of a student's ability had higher correlations with the final examination than did quizzes composed of questions randomly selected from topic areas. (Author/JAZ)

Item parameter estimates vary for a variety of reasons, including estimation error, characteristics of the examinee samples, and context effects (e.g., item location effects, section location effects, etc.). Although we expect variation based on theory, there is reason to believe that observed variation in item parameter estimates exceeds what…

The availability of item response times made possible by computerized testing represents an entirely new type of information about test items. This study explores the issue of how to represent response-time information in item banks. Empirical response-time distribution functions can be fit with statistical distribution functions with known…

The extensive computer simulation work done in developing the computer adaptive versions of the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) Board General Test and the College Board Admissions Testing Program (ATP) Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is described in this report. Both the GRE General and SAT computer adaptive tests (CATs), which are fixed length…

The accuracy of estimation of the subjects' latent ability maintained by tailoring for each testee the order of item presentation and the border of item dichotomization was compared to the information provided by the original graded test items. (RC)

The accuracy with which expert systems (ESs) score a new nonmultiple-choice free-response test item was investigated, using 734 high school students who were administered an advanced-placement computer science examination. ESs produced scores for 82 percent to 95 percent of the responses and displayed high agreement with a human reader on the…

Investigates the performance of students from different language backgrounds, using data from a computer-adaptive Japanese grammar test developed as a placement tool. Findings indicate item difficulties to be quite different for each group of candidates and imply that when candidates are from a different background from that of the trial…

SIETTE is a web-based adaptive testing system. It implements Computerized Adaptive Tests. These tests are tailor-made, theory-based tests, where questions shown to students, finalization of the test, and student knowledge estimation is accomplished adaptively. To construct these tests, SIETTE has an authoring environment comprising a suite of…

Technology today offers many new opportunities for innovation in educational assessment through rich new assessment tasks and potentially powerful scoring, reporting and real-time feedback mechanisms. One potential limitation for realizing the benefits of computer-based assessment in both instructional assessment and large scale testing comes in…

In this technical report, we describe the development and piloting of a series of mathematics progress monitoring measures intended for use with students in grades kindergarten through eighth grade. These measures, available as part of easyCBM[TM], an online progress monitoring assessment system, were developed in 2007 and 2008 and administered to…

A new free-response item type for mathematics tests is described. The item type, referred to as the Student-Produced Response (SPR), was first introduced into the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test in 1993 and into the Scholastic Aptitude Test in 1994. Students solve a problem and record the answer by…

In recent years, a controversy has arisen about the advisability of allowing examinees to review their test items and possibly change answers. Arguments for and against allowing item review are discussed, and issues that a test designer should consider when designing a Computerized Adaptive Test (CAT) are identified. Most CATs do not allow…

The strategies examinees employ when making item difficulty level choices in self-adapted computerized testing were investigated. Subjects were 148 college students (88 females and 60 males) in an introductory statistics course. The primary instrument was a self-adapted computerized algebra test used to measure student readiness for the statistics…