Many institutions use placement tests as a method to assess students' readiness for college-level coursework. With the increased use of technology in testing, many institutions have transitioned placement test administration to an online format in an unproctored setting. While unproctored placement tests may provide financial and logistical…

Background/Context: Because metacognitive knowledge includes knowledge about adequate learning strategies, and because an effective use of learning strategies is associated with higher levels of performance, substantial relationships can be assumed between metacognitive knowledge, strategic behavior, and performance. However, such a pattern of…

Bully victimization is associated with lower academic performance for individual students; however, less is known about the impact of bullying on the academic performance of the school as a whole. This study examined how retrospective administrator reports of both the prevalence of teasing and bullying (PTB) and the use of evidence-based bullying…

In this research, we investigated the suitability of implementing "e-rater"® automated essay scoring in a high-stakes large-scale English language testing program. We examined the effectiveness of generic scoring and 2 variants of prompt-based scoring approaches. Effectiveness was evaluated on a number of dimensions, including agreement…

Promoting Acceleration of Comprehension and Content through Text (PACT) and similar team-based models directly engage and support students in learning situations that require cognitive elaboration as part of the processing of new information. Elaboration is subject to metacognitive control, as well (Karpicke, "Journal of Experimental…

Scope and Method of Study: The study investigated the relationship between performance on the Oklahoma State Testing Program (OSTP) for grades 3-7 and the EXPLORE in math and reading for 586 students. The EXPLORE test, a part of the ACT, is given in the eighth grade and provides college readiness benchmarks and a national percentile ranking (NPR)…

This study investigates whether a common set of student attitudes and behavioral tendencies can account for academic achievement across different, especially high-performing, countries via analysis of the PISA 2009 international data set. The 13 countries examined are 5 of the top-performing Eastern countries/systems, namely Shanghai China, South…

Nonparametric or kernel regression estimation of item response curves (IRCs) is often used in item analysis in testing programs. These estimates are biased when the observed scores are used as the regressor because the observed scores are contaminated by measurement error. Accuracy of this estimation is a concern theoretically and operationally.…

Maintaining comparability of test scores is a major challenge faced by testing programs that have almost continuous administrations. Among the potential problems are scale drift and rapid accumulation of errors. Many standard quality control techniques for testing programs, which can effectively detect and address scale drift for small numbers of…

With increased emphasis on accountability, the use of low-stakes test data to make high-stakes decisions about program effectiveness is on the rise. In order to make valid inferences about what students know and can do, it is crucial to understand the consequences of low and high stakes in testing contexts. As a result, with a sample comprised of…

In educational tests, subscores are often generated from a portion of the items in a larger test. Guidelines based on mean squared error are proposed to indicate whether subscores are worth reporting. Alternatives considered are direct reports of subscores, estimates of subscores based on total score, combined estimates based on subscores and…

This study is an evaluation of the psychometric issues associated with estimating objective level scores, often referred to as "subscores." The article begins by introducing the concepts of reliability and validity for subscores from statewide achievement tests. These issues are discussed with reference to popular scaling techniques, classical…

Operational testing programs employing item response theory (IRT) applications benefit from of the property of item parameter invariance whereby item parameter estimates obtained from one sample can be applied to other samples (when the underlying assumptions are satisfied). In theory, this feature allows for applications such as computer-adaptive…

This article reports on the action taken by Texas officials to maintain the integrity of their testing program. Responding to a potential cheating scandal uncovered by a recent newspaper investigation, Texas officials announced a sweeping review of test security and plans for a new monitoring scheme for the state accountability system, which has…

One method to correct for selection bias in comparing Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores among states is presented, which is a modification of J. J. Heckman's Selection Bias Correction (1976, 1979). Empirical results suggest that sample selection bias is present in SAT score regressions. (SLD)