Public schools in the U.S. today are educating more students from language and racial/ethnic minority backgrounds and from lower socioeconomic groups. Schools, however, have a long history of providing inequitable educational opportunities that disadvantage low income students and students of color who are increasingly segregated in under-funded…

The requirement for all Initial Teacher Education programs in Australia to include a capstone teacher performance assessment (TPA) is relatively new. However, TPAs are common in other countries, particularly the United States. In this article, we report on a review of the literature instigated by the authors' involvement in the development of an…

The study was conducted to analyze the items about the ability of high school students diagram representation and obtain Item Curve Characteristic. Grid test instruments are compiled based on competencies and indicators of diagram representation which are then used to compile items. The test instrument consisted of five items and was validated by…

The present longitudinal study investigated the developmental trajectories of addition, subtraction, and multiplication fluency; their relationships to general cognitive functions; and potential interrelations between reading fluency and growth in arithmetic fluency for different operations. The central prediction was that measures of arithmetic…

We investigated whether consensus-based test translation review procedures can be used effectively in cultural contexts with high social stratification. We staged two test translation review panels in China -- where social stratification may potentially inhibit individuals' ability to express opinion and disagreement. We adapted a consensus-based…

TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) is a long-standing international assessment of mathematics and science at the fourth and eighth grades that has been collecting trend data every four years since 1995. About 70 countries use TIMSS trend data for monitoring the effectiveness of their education systems in a global…

Achieving sufficient proficiency in academic writing is critical in university level setting. It is not surprising hence, that the admission to English speaking universities is usually conditioned not only by a particular total score from Standardized tests of English proficiency, e.g., TOEFL or IELTs but also a specific band score in writing. To…

Listen-to-summarize cloze (LSC) tasks are not rare in high-stakes language tests; however, we know little about what test-takers do during the tasks. In our study, we examined 16 students' think-aloud protocols (TAPs) which were recorded while they were completing two LSC tasks. The analysis of the 16 TAPs indicated iterative cognitive processes…

This study investigated second language learners' fairness perceptions of a classroom-based language test and whether those perceptions were predictive of justice judgments of their language program. Classroom test fairness was conceptualized as a multidimensional construct, consisting of distributive fairness (how fairly test scores represent…

Background: Middle school students use the information conveyed by morphemes (i.e., units of meaning such as prefixes, root words and suffixes) in different ways to support their literacy endeavours, suggesting the likelihood that morphological knowledge is multidimensional. This has important implications for assessment. Methods: The current…

This study sought to explore the advanced lexicon, one of the hallmarks of text quality. To this end, we analysed the advanced lexicon deployed in the production of two types of texts -- a descriptive and an argumentative -- by Hebrew-speaking school children. Our study had two goals, the first to trace the developmental path of the use of…

The West Virginia Department of Education has crafted this document to offer policy guidance to teams and Section 504 committees in providing appropriate access for students in statewide assessments; and to assist teachers and schools to work within the framework of federal law and state policies. The guidelines are referenced by West Virginia…

This study investigated the effect of consistent freewriting practice on written fluency development. Thirty-nine first-year university students completed 70 10-minute freewriting activities over the course of an academic semester. Written fluency, measured as words produced per minute (wpm), increased from a mean of 19.5 wpm to 30.1 wpm over a…

The purpose of this study is two-fold: 1) to investigate the effects of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) framed within the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH) on Thai learners' use of academic collocations and 2) to examine how Thai learners utilized the involvement load (IL) components (need, search, and evaluation) to master academic collocations. It is…

School leadership ranks as an essential factor for successful schools. The purpose of this study is therefore to investigate the effects of two central leadership practices -- "setting directions" and "managing instructional processes" -- on both instructional quality (mediator) and student achievement (target) in Austrian…