To keep pace with medicine's unpredictable changes, medical trainees must learn to accurately monitor and evaluate themselves via metacognition (i.e., thinking about thinking). The Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) can assess and guide the metacognitive development of trainees. This study summarizes existing psychometric evidence and…

Part of the mission of IEA (the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) is to support education systems worldwide with data-driven insights for evidence-based policies and improved student learning outcomes. Together with the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College, LaNA (Literacy and…

Mathematical abstraction skills are fundamental for advanced reasoning and problem-solving, yet assessing these skills in senior high school students poses challenges due to limited validated instruments. This study aims to develop and validate a test instrument for measuring mathematical abstraction skills in Indonesian high school students. The…

This study aims to evaluate the quality of English reading comprehension test instruments used in informal learning, especially as English literacy tests. With a quantitative approach, the analysis was carried out using the Rasch model through the Quest program on 30 multiple-choice questions given to 30 grade IX students from informal educational…

This article details the challenges and best practices of evaluating second language learners for placement into postsecondary Spanish language courses. The literature on testing for placement purposes in second language acquisition and language testing provides a great deal of insight, but language programs must make many decisions as well that…

The present study has aimed to develop and validate a protein concept inventory (PCI) consisting of 25 multiple-choice (MC) questions to assess students' understanding of protein, which is a fundamental concept across different biology disciplines. The development process of the PCI involved a literature review to identify protein-related content,…

Mixed-format assessments made up of multiple-choice (MC) items and constructed response (CR) items that are scored using rater judgments include unique psychometric considerations. When these item types are combined to estimate examinee achievement, information about the psychometric quality of each component can depend on that of the other. For…

Empowerment is a concept that has become increasingly used over recent years. However, little research has been undertaken into how empowerment can be evaluated, particularly in the case of young people. The aim of this article is to present an inventory of dimensions and indicators of youth empowerment. The article describes the various phases in…

Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are a common way to assess reading comprehension. Every MCQ needs a set of distractor answers that are incorrect, but plausible enough to test student knowledge. However, good distractors are hard to create. Distractor generation (DG) models have been proposed, and their performance is typically evaluated using…

Embedded Standard Setting (ESS; Lewis & Cook, 2020) transforms standard setting from a standalone workshop to an active part of the assessment development lifecycle. ESS purports to lower costs by eliminating the standard-setting workshop and enhance the validity argument by maintaining a consistent focus on the evidentiary relationship…

This paper proposes an extension of linear equating that may be useful in one of two fairly common assessment scenarios. One is where different students have taken different combinations of test forms. This might occur, for example, where students have some free choice over the exam papers they take within a particular qualification. In this…

This study examined the widely used threshold of 0.2 for Yen's Q3, an index for violations of local independence. Specifically, a simulation was conducted to investigate whether Q3 values were related to the magnitude of bias in estimates of reliability, item parameters, and examinee ability. Results showed that Q3 values below the typical cut-off…

A test battery with two different levels of adaptation is presented: a within-subtest level for the selection of the items in the subtests and a between-subtest level to move from one subtest to the next. The battery runs on a two-level model consisting of a regular response model for each of the subtests extended with a second level for the joint…

The test blueprint is important in test development, where it guides the test item writer in creating test items according to the desired objectives and specifications or characteristics (so-called a priori item characteristics), such as the level of item difficulty in the category and the distribution of items based on their difficulty level.…

GCSE examinations (taken by students aged 16 years in England) are not intended to be speeded (i.e. to be partly a test of how quickly students can answer questions). However, there has been little research exploring this. The aim of this research was to explore the speededness of past GCSE written examinations, using only the data from scored…