The COLA project has been developing a large bank of assessment items for units across the Scottish further education curriculum since May 2003. These will be made available to learners mainly via colleges' virtual learning environments (VLEs). Many people have been involved in the development of the COLA assessment item bank to ensure a high…

Today, with the requirements of NCLB and state standards, schools are locked into a culture that seems to assume one size fits all. Teachers' focus is on preparing students to pass tests rather than on developing thoughtful curriculum. In this article, the authors discuss how teachers can move away from the constraints of disciplines and topics…

Background: The Approaches to Teaching Inventory (ATI) is structured as two main scales, reflecting a teacher-centred information-transmission approach versus a student-centred conceptual-change approach, each subdivided into intention and strategy subscales. Its use in higher education investigations is increasing and, by default, it is assuming…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

In this study, mixed Rasch modeling was used on the Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS), a widely used measure of depression, among a non-Western sample of 618 Korean college students. The results revealed three latent classes and confirmed the unidimensionality of the SDS. In addition, there was a significant effect for gender in terms of class…

This study investigates differential item functioning (DIF) in a 36-item test of English as a Second Language pragmalinguistics, assessing 254 learners' knowledge of implicature, routines, and speech acts. Two common DIF techniques, the Mantel-Haenszel method and the standardization method, detected nine items functioning differentially for test…

A previous study of new item types for the analytical measure of the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) General Test found that the new items had many factors labeled verbal reasoning, informal reasoning, formal-deductive reasoning, and quantitative reasoning. The present study examined how processing differed for these item types in the context…

Based on initial Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) Verbal pretest data and hypotheses advanced in the research literature, 7 sentence completion and 16 analogy items with extreme levels of differential item functioning (DIF) were selected and then systematically revised and re-administered in an attempt to reduce or eliminate DIF. The apparent…

A multiple choice test item is identified as flawed if it has no single best answer. In spite of extensive quality control procedures, the administration of flawed items to test-takers is inevitable. Common strategies for dealing with flawed items in conventional testing, grounded in the principle of fairness to test-takers, are reexamined in the…

A study was undertaken to determine the effects on essay scores of intermingling handwritten and word-processed versions of student essays. A sample of 32 examinees, each of whom had produced both a handwritten and a word-processed essay, was drawn from a larger group who had participated in a pilot study of item types for The Praxis Series:…