School vouchers are state-funded programs--often called scholarship programs--that allow students to use public monies to attend a private school. The state provides a set amount of money, typically based on the state's per-pupil amount, for private school tuition. There are currently 27 voucher programs in 16 states and the District of Columbia.…

In investigations of unusual testing behavior, a common question is whether a specific pattern of responses occurs unusually often within a group of examinees. In many current tests, modern communication techniques can permit quite large numbers of examinees to share keys, or common response patterns, to the entire test. To address this issue,…

The comparison of item-level computerized adaptive testing (CAT) and multistage adaptive testing (MST) has been researched extensively (e.g., Kim & Plake, 1993; Luecht et al., 1996; Patsula, 1999; Jodoin, 2003; Hambleton & Xing, 2006; Keng, 2008; Zheng, 2012). Various CAT and MST designs have been investigated and compared under the same…

The ways in which pedagogical practices have evolved and how to understand the teaching and learning process are different. With the use of the Internet, the sources of information and evaluation are amplified, and educational agents within virtual education play an important role, reflecting on a new paradigm of learning and knowledge…

The "D"-scoring method for scoring and equating tests with binary items proposed by Dimitrov offers some of the advantages of item response theory, such as item-level difficulty information and score computation that reflects the item difficulties, while retaining the merits of classical test theory such as the simplicity of number…

Purpose: We review and interpret our recent series of studies investigating motor-to-auditory influences during speech movement planning in fluent speakers and speakers who stutter. In those studies, we recorded auditory evoked potentials in response to probe tones presented immediately prior to speaking or at the equivalent time in no-speaking…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to compare the overall usability and user experience of desktop computers and mobile-devices when used in a summative assessment in the context of a higher education course. Design/methodology/approach: The study follows a between-groups design. The participants were 110 first-year undergraduate students from…

Concerns about the replication crisis and unreliable findings have spread through several fields, including education and psychological research. In some areas of education, researchers have begun to adopt reforms that have proven useful in other fields. These include preregistration, open materials and data, and registered reports. These reforms…

Retrieval practice relative to restudy of learned material typically attenuates time-dependent forgetting. A recent study examining this testing effect across 12-h delays filled with nocturnal sleep versus daytime wakefulness, however, showed that sleep directly following encoding benefited recall of restudied but not of retrieval practiced items,…

Students studying statistics often misunderstand what statistics represent. Some of the most well-known misunderstandings of statistics revolve around null hypothesis significance testing. One pervasive misunderstanding is that the calculated p-value represents the probability that the null hypothesis is true, and that if p < 0.05, there is…

Clinical cognitive ability assessment--and its corollary, score interpretation--are in a state of disarray. Many current instruments are designed to provide a bevy of scores to appeal to a variety of school psychologists. These scores are not all grounded in the attribute's theory or developed from sound measurement or psychometric theory. Thus,…

This article describes and reviews the "Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function, Second Edition" (BRIEF2; Gioia, Isquith, Guy, & Kenworthy, 2015). Published by PARInc., it is an updated individually administered rating scale of executive function (EF) for children and youth, aged 5 to 18 years. Primarily used in clinical,…

The use of e-assessment methods raises important concerns regarding the reliability and validity of these methods. Potential threats to validity include mode effects and the possible influence of computer-related attitudes. Although numerous studies have now investigated the validity of online assessments in noncourse-based contexts, few studies…

Performance on figure copying tasks is empirically linked to the school readiness, learning, cognition, and neuropsychological functioning. These nonverbal tasks are frequently used to evaluate children from diverse backgrounds to minimize bias due to factors such as language, ethnicity, culture, or socioeconomic status on test performance. The…

Log files from computer-based assessment can help better understand respondents' behaviours and cognitive strategies. Analysis of timing information from Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) reveals large differences in the time participants take to answer assessment items, as well as large country differences…