The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides greater flexibility in state accountability systems than did previous federal legislation. In response, many states continue to refine their accountability systems to include college readiness tests, including college admissions and placement exams. This paper summarizes perspectives of K-12…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a promising form of online education. However, the occurrence of academic dishonesty has been threatening MOOC certificates' effectiveness as a serious tool for recruiters and employers. Recently, a large-scale study on the log traces from more than one hundred MOOCs created by Harvard and MIT has identified…

Computerized adaptive testing offers the possibility of gaining information on both the overall ability and cognitive profile in a single assessment administration. Some algorithms aiming for these dual purposes have been proposed, including the shadow test approach, the dual information method (DIM), and the constraint weighted method. The…

This study compared four item-selection procedures developed for use with severely constrained computerized adaptive tests (CATs). Severely constrained CATs refer to those adaptive tests that seek to meet a complex set of constraints that are often not conclusive to each other (i.e., an item may contribute to the satisfaction of several…

This dissertation examined the overall effects of routing and scoring within a computer adaptive multi-stage framework (ca-MST). Testing in a ca-MST environment has become extremely popular in the testing industry. Testing companies enjoy its efficiency benefits as compared to traditionally linear testing and its quality-control features over…

This project examined academic reading in two contrasting English as a medium of instruction (EMI) university settings in Nepal and Sweden and the unique challenges facing students who are studying in a language other than their primary language. The motivation for the project was to explore the role of high-stakes testing in EMI contexts and the…

Multiple test tasks are available for assessing L2 collocation knowledge. However, few studies have investigated the characteristics of a variety of recognition and recall tasks of collocation simultaneously, and most research on L2 collocations has focused on verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations. This study investigates (1) the relative…

There has been a growing interest among educators over the past few years in formative assessment. Formative assessment, referred to as assessment for learning or assessment as learning, is a planned, ongoing process during which teachers collect information on students' academic performance to enhance the learning and teaching experience and…

Part of a mini series of Focus books on COVID-19 in Malaysia, the chapters in this book address the pandemic's impacts on education and literacy. Covering a range of teaching and learning challenges impacting learners and teachers, the contributors highlight the pervasiveness of the pandemic on Malaysian society and how Malaysians have found ways…

Computer-assisted assessment (CAA) is problematic when it comes to fostering creativity, because in educational thinking the essence of creativity is not finding the correct answer but generating novelty. The idea of "functional" creativity provides rubrics that can serve as the basis for forms of CAA leading to either formative or…

Purpose: This study investigated the feasibility and potential validity of an item response theory (IRT)-based computerized adaptive testing (CAT) version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words & Sentences (CDI:WS; Fenson et al., 2007) vocabulary checklist, with the objective of reducing length while maintaining…

It is one thing to produce an innovative, construct-based assessment task; it's another to produce 10 a year that are comparable in difficulty, measure the same competencies, are free of differential item functioning, and can be scaled and equated. These challenges contributed to the failure of the performance (or authentic) assessment movement of…

Despite the increasing number of individuals taking computer-based tests, little is known about how examinees perceive computer-based testing environments and the extent to which these testing environments are perceived to affect test performance. The purpose of the present study was to assess the testing environment as perceived by individuals…

Hampton (1988) discovered that people are subject to "overextension"--they categorize some things as falling under a conjunction (e.g., they categorize chess as a "sport which is also a game") but not as falling under both of the corresponding conjuncts (e.g., they do not categorize chess as a "sport"). Although…

A growing body of literature suggests that response latency, the amount of time it takes an individual to respond to an item, may be an important factor to consider when using assessment data to estimate the ability of an individual. Considering that tests of passage and list fluency are being adapted to a computer administration format, it is…