A direct test of English speaking is important to evaluate what learners can do in real-life situations. However, due to challenges in test administration, especially with a large number of test-takers, a direct speaking test may not be feasible in many contexts and thus indirect tests, such as conversational cloze tests, are mainly used. In…

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted traditional methods of teaching and learning within higher education. But what remained when the pandemic passed? While the majority of the literature explores the shifts "during" the pandemic, with much speculation about post-pandemic futures, a clear understanding of lasting implications…

This study examines business students' learning and assessment under remote teachings during the COVID-19 pandemic in a well-established Finnish university. A survey method is used to collect information on 336 business students including 42 accounting students. As indicated by students' responses, a majority of the students succeeded in assessing…

Automated assessment using Natural Language Processing (NLP) has the potential to make English speaking assessments more reliable, authentic, and accessible. Yet without careful examination, NLP may exacerbate social prejudices based on gender or native language (L1). Current NLP-based assessments are prone to such biases, yet research and…

Despite the viva being an essential component of all PhD and other doctoral qualifications in UK universities, there is little research into their accessibility for autistic students, or the process of adjusting them to individual students' needs. Autistic student voices about the viva are almost completely absent from the literature. This paper…

Exergames (video games that promote cognitive and physical activity simultaneously) benefit executive function (EF) in elderly populations. It has been suggested that exergames may induce larger effects than cognitive or exercise training alone, but few reviews have synthesized the causal factors of exergames on EF from experimental research with…

We examine the impact of remedial and developmental courses on college students with varying levels of academic preparedness, thus focusing on a wider range of students than previous studies. Using a regression discontinuity design, we provide causal estimates of the effects of placement in different levels of remedial courses on short-,…

The development of novel educational assessment models founded on item response theory (IRT), as well as software tools designed to implement these models, has contributed to the surge in computerized adaptive tests (CATs). The distinguishing characteristic of CATs is that the sequence of items on a test progressively adapts to the performance…

The goal of this study was to determine if typically developing children could form grammatical categories from distributional information alone. Twenty-seven children aged six to nine listened to an artifcial grammar which contained strategic gaps in its distribution. At test, we compared how children rated novel sentences that ft the grammar to…

The top-down approach to designing a multistage test is relatively understudied in the literature and underused in research and practice. This study introduced a route-based top-down design approach that directly sets design parameters at the test level and utilizes the advanced automated test assembly algorithm seeking global optimality. The…

Confidence ratings (CR) are often used to evaluate the metacognitive processes that occur during reasoning and problem solving. Typically CR are elicited with the assumption that they do not affect participants' underlying cognitive processes. However, recent evidence suggests that eliciting CR can cause changes in cognitive performance. What is…

The final step of the typical process of developing educational and psychological tests is to place the selected test items in a formatted form. The step involves the grouping and ordering of the items to meet a variety of formatting constraints. As this activity tends to be time-intensive, the use of mixed-integer programming (MIP) has been…

Recent studies have shown that exposure to a novel environment may stabilize the persistence of weak memories, a phenomenon often attributed to a process referred to as "behavioral tagging." While this phenomenon has been repeatedly demonstrated in adult animals, no studies to date have examined whether it occurs in infant animals, which…

This chapter explores early impacts from the Florida College system's bold experiment in making placement testing and developmental education optional for most students.

As a condition of receiving federal funds, the Every Student Succeeds Act requires state education agencies to implement statewide assessments in mathematics and English language arts every year in third through eighth grade and once in ninth through 12th grade. The federal law also requires a science assessment once in each of three grade spans:…