Beginning with the 2020/21 school year, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) began an ongoing effort to collect and analyze literacy screening assessment data from schools and districts participating in certain state grants to inform improvement efforts. Grantee schools and districts that provide literacy…

Beginning with the 2020/21 school year, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) began an ongoing effort to collect and analyze early literacy screening assessment data from schools and districts participating in certain state grants to inform improvement efforts. Outcome data suggest that the current educational…

There has been a paradigm shift from accommodations to the identification of levels of accessibility (e.g., universal features, designated features, and accommodations). A consequence of this shift is that many students with disabilities who previously were assigned accommodations now access many of them as universal or designated features. This…

The New York State Education Department (NYSED) has a partnership with NWEA for the development of the 2024 Grades 3-8 English Language Arts Tests. Teachers from across the State work with NYSED in a variety of activities to ensure the validity and reliability of the New York State Testing Program (NYSTP). The 2024 Grades 3 and 4 English Language…

We tested the impacts of Hofstede's cultural factors and mode of administration on item nonresponse (INR) for political questions in the European Values Study (EVS). We worked with the integrated European Values Study dataset, using descriptive analysis and multilevel binary logistic regression models. We concluded that (1) modes of administration…

Common indicator-based approaches to identifying careless and insufficient effort responding (C/IER) in survey data scan response vectors or timing data for aberrances, such as patterns signaling straight lining, multivariate outliers, or signals that respondents rushed through the administered items. Each of these approaches is susceptible to…

Take-home exam (THE) use has been reported in various disciplines, but research on THE use in language modules in higher education appears to be scarce. The current study employed surveys and interviews to examine how the shift to written THE, in place of the traditional in-class exam (ICE) during the pandemic, impacted language learning and…

Dr. Tracey Burns is a Senior Analyst in the OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. She heads a portfolio of projects including Innovative Teaching for Effective Learning, 21st Century Children and Trends Shaping Education. Until recently she was also responsible for the OECD work on Governing Complex Education systems. Previous to…

This study attempted to check the impact of two dynamic assessment (DA) models on speaking CAF. DA, as opposed to static assessment, is conceived as an interactive approach to assessment that integrates teaching and testing into a unified instructional engagement. To achieve the goals of this research, a convenience sample of 90 upper-intermediate…

E-authentication is one of the key topics in the field of online education and e-assessment. This study was aimed at investigating the user experiences of students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) while developing the accessible e-authentication system for higher education institutions. Altogether, 15 students tested the…

It has been argued in the literature on (language) testing that any act of testing/assessment can impact: (1) educators' curriculum design; (2) teachers' teaching practices; and (3) students' learning behaviors. This quality of any given testing situation or act of assessment has been called washback, or backwash if you will. Washback falls into…

The "Raven's 2 Progressive Matrices Clinical Edition" (Raven's 2; Raven, Rust, Chan, & Zhou, 2018), published by NCS Pearson, is an individually administered nonverbal assessment of general cognitive ability developed to measure "educative abilities," defined as the ability to think clearly and solve complex problems in…

Virtual proctoring technology is credited with increasing the accessibility of exams by enabling students to participate in exams at any time and place. In this field experiment, students were randomly assigned to virtual proctoring or traditional on-campus examination to evaluate the effect, nature and timing of implementation barriers for online…

When tests are low stakes for examinees, meaning there are little to no personal consequences associated with test results, some examinees put little effort into their performance. To understand the causes and consequences of diminished effort, researchers correlate test-taking effort with other variables, such as test-taking emotions and test…

Automated essay scoring (AES), where natural language processing is applied to score written text, can underpin educational resources in blended and distance learning. AES performance has typically been reported in terms of correlation coefficients or agreement statistics calculated between a system and an expert human examiner. We describe the…