Interviews, questionnaires and tests may fail as evaluations of pragmatic competence in a foreign language because they cannot reproduce contexts in sufficient detail and/or because they cannot constrain discourse options without contaminating the learner response. In this study a cartoon Discourse Completion Test (DCT) prompt was used, providing…

While recent research has begun to explore how social studies teachers are responding to a standardized curriculum and its accompanying high-stakes tests, little is known about how teacher education programs are preparing their pre-service teachers for a world in which state curriculum standards and standardized testing often determine the content…

A multiple choice test item is identified as flawed if it has no single best answer. In spite of extensive quality control procedures, the administration of flawed items to test-takers is inevitable. Common strategies for dealing with flawed items in conventional testing, grounded in the principle of fairness to test-takers, are reexamined in the…

The potential for computer adaptive testing (CAT) has been well documented. In order to improve the efficiency of this process, it may be possible to utilize a neural network, or more specifically, a back propagation neural network. The paper asserts that in order to accomplish this end, it must be shown that grouping examinees by ability as…

This document is 7th in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education monograph series. The mathematical performance of (n=250) U.S. 6th-grade students from both private and public schools and (n=425) Chinese 6th-graders from both key and common schools was examined on multiple-choice tasks assessing computation and simple problem solving, and…

A study was conducted to determine whether competently reasoning clinicians (clinical instructors in medical instruction) could identify reasons competently reasoning students would eliminate distractors, and explain how students would reason to select the keyed response when solving multiple-choice items. The think-aloud protocols of clinicians…

This study applies multidimensional scaling (MDS) to a knowledge organization problem involving 12 concepts in pulmonary physiology. The concept structures were derived from individual medical and veterinary students before and after focused instruction. One hundred seventy medical students and 85 veterinary medical students completed a…

The present study investigated the effects of using different forms of material with 100 eleventh grade students enrolled in a 5-week CBI (computer based instruction) summer enrichment program in Memphis, Tennessee. The basic design consisted of two conditions of instructional support (text and questions vs. questions only), two testings…

A correlational analysis was performed to examine the relationship between recognition and recall test formats. A total of 236 college students completed one of four 80-item general knowledge tests; the forms contained 20 items of each of four formats: (1) true; (2) false; (3) multiple-choice; and (4) free response. Ninety-three of the subjects…

Using a 6-week, test-retest design with 37 third-grade students, the stability of the Reading Style Inventory (RSI) was assessed. The consistency of the recommended reading method interventions that derive from the RSI was also examined. The RSI consists of 52 items organized into two sections. The first section contains 14 three-option questions…

Test data from a large licensure examination were used to investigate the impact of the number of score groups and score group size on the Mantel-Haenszel (MH) alpha statistic. Two kinds of quasi-experimental studies were conducted: (1) baseline MH analyses in which the number of score groups and the ethnicity of each randomly equivalent…

The present research investigated the claim that certain intellectual characteristics predict attitudes toward multiple-choice tests, particularly the claim that creative persons hold negative attitudes toward these tests. The study examined the relationships between attitudes toward multiple-choice tests and convergent production, divergent…

Designed to assess immediate and delayed comprehension of expository prose, this instrument is a 40-item multiple-choice test composed of open-ended stems, each followed by four nonoverlapping choices. Control of content of the items was based upon an analysis of the accompanying 1,300-word passage on the Kalahari Desert. Validity, reliability,…

An extension of the Bock-Samejima model for multiple choice items is introduced. The model provides for varying probabilities of the response alternative when the examinee guesses. A marginal maximum likelihood method is devised for estimating the item parameters, and likelihood ratio tests for comparing more and less constrained forms of the…

Assessment is one of the most important part of educational process that directs teaching, learning as well as curriculum development. However, widely used classical assessment techniques such as multiple choice tests are not adequate to provide neither a correct picture of students' performances nor the effectiveness of the teaching process.…