Both of us were drawn into the writing assessment field initially through our lived experiences as schoolteachers. We worked in radically different contexts -- Martin was head of a languages department and teacher of French and German in the late 1990s in the UK, and David was a Grade 12 teacher of Academic English in Alberta, Canada, at the turn…

Ensuring students master their basic facts is a shared priority among teachers, parents, and administrators. As a result, the number of available resources for basic facts instruction, from concrete to virtual, is vast and continues to grow. Basic fact fluency has always been of interest to elementary school teachers and is particularly relevant…

Accommodations, deserved or undeserved, have been under the microscope in 2019. They played a prominent role in this year's Varsity Blues college admissions scandal, with prosecutors alleging that wealthy parents persuaded willing psychologists to say their child needed extra time in special testing centers--in a few cases, ringers proctored the…

A common approach to increase test security in higher educational high-stakes testing is the use of different test forms with identical items but different item orders. The effects of such varied item orders are relatively well studied, but findings have generally been mixed. When multiple test forms with different item orders are used, we argue…

The excellent paper by Goldhammer (this issue) deals with a most relevant and very pervasive problem of ability assessment: the evaluation of performance by considering speed and accuracy of performance. Goldhammer proposes item-level time limits as a possible remedy for individual differences in the speed-accuracy trade-off (SATO) to keep time…

It is shown how the time limit on a test can be set to control the probability of a test taker running out of time before completing it. The probability is derived from the item parameters in the lognormal model for response times. Examples of curves representing the probability of running out of time on a test with given parameters as a function…

This article is a commentary of a paper by Derek C. Briggs and Frederick A. Peck, "Using Learning Progressions to Design Vertical Scales That Support Coherent Inferences about Student Growth," which describes an elegant potential framework for at least beginning to address three priorities in large-scale assessment that have not been…

Scoring SAT-style exam essays, John S. O'Connor is struck by the disconnection between the subject matter and students' personal lives. Further, O'Connor notes that such tests draw an alarming distinction between writing and "content"--as if the two are unrelated. O'Connor calls for a broader understanding of literacy, and he warns of dire…

College professors often regard their time in the classroom fulfilling and rewarding; the chance to affect the academic and professional development of their students is most likely a key reason why they chose to be professional educators. Unfortunately, with college courses come college credits, which necessitate a course grade for each student,…

Speededness refers to the situation where the time limits on a standardized test do not allow substantial numbers of examinees to fully consider all test items. When tests are not intended to measure speed of responding, speededness introduces a severe threat to the validity of interpretations based on test scores. In this article, we describe…

The author considers a latent trait model for the response time on a (set of) pure speed test(s), the multiplicative gamma model (MGM), which is based on the assumption that the test response times are approximately gamma distributed, with known index parameters and scale parameters depending on subject ability and test difficulty parameters. Like…

This article describes the use of a Dutch pyramid model that may help teachers design assessment problems that go beyond reproduction and need mathematization, generalization, and insight. (Contains 4 figures.)

Professional speakers often use simple mental recipes to organize impromptu talks. The author taught these recipes to his high school composition students and used a timed trial format to give them practice in rapidly outlining their thoughts on a given topic. Thirteen of these recipes are provided. (SJL)

Two new tests for a model for the response times on pure speed tests by Rasch (1960) are proposed. The model is based on the assumption that the test response times are approximately gamma distributed, with known index parameters and unknown rate parameters. The rate parameters are decomposed in a subject ability parameter and a test difficulty…

This paper proposes an item selection algorithm that can be used to neutralize the effect of time limits in computer adaptive testing. The method is based on a statistical model for the response-time distributions of the test takers on the items in the pool that is updated each time a new item has been administered. Predictions from the model are…