Cognitive ability tests are widely used in organizations around the world because they have high predictive validity in selection contexts. Although these tests typically measure several subdomains, testing is usually carried out for a single subdomain at a time. This can be ineffective when the subdomains assessed are highly correlated. This…

New Zealand schools increasingly use inquiry to understand and address complex and persistent issues. This requires schools to have committed Lead Teachers with deep knowledge about inquiry. The collection of studies in this book have been compiled by the research team at the Woolf Fisher Research Centre, University of Auckland, to illustrate the…

This study investigates early childhood educators' language training competence that is required to support children's linguistic development. Hundred and forty-four early-years-professionals in Germany completed a computer-based assessment. We first tested knowledge of linguistic topics (e.g. morpho-syntax, developmental stages). Second, we…

People are generally skilled at using a confidence scale to rate the strength of their memories over a wide range. Specifically, low-confidence recognition decisions are often associated with close-to-chance accuracy, whereas high-confidence recognition decisions can be associated with close-to-perfect accuracy. However, using a 20-point rating…

Research in automated creation of test items for assessment purposes became increasingly important during the recent years. Due to automatic question creation it is possible to support personalized and self-directed learning activities by preparing appropriate and individualized test items quite easily with relatively little effort or even fully…

Colleges and universities have been among the leaders nationwide in adopting green initiatives, partly due to their demographics, but also because they are facing their own budget pressures. Virtualization has become the poster child of many schools' efforts, because it provides significant bang for the buck. However, more and more higher…

The final regulations of the "No Child Left Behind" Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2007a, 2007b) indicate that a small group of students with disabilities can be counted as proficient through an alternate assessment based on modified academic achievement standards. This new policy gives individualized education program teams the…

This study investigated the comparability of paper and computer versions of a functional writing assessment administered to adults 16 and older. Three writing tasks were administered in both paper and computer modes to volunteers in the field test of an assessment of adult literacy in 2008. One set of analyses examined mode effects on scoring by…

Online assessments are essential parts of online learning. There are some debates on quality of online assessments. Nevertheless the study considered online exams as an instructional activity and aimed to examine the effects of online exams on students' engagements related to course goals. The study was conducted on two cases, which are…

Learning to program is a difficult process for novice programmers. AutoLEP, an automated learning and assessment system, was developed by us, to aid novice programmers to obtain programming skills. AutoLEP is ability-training-oriented. It adopts a novel assessment mechanism, which combines static analysis with dynamic testing to analyze student…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to examine the accuracy, latency, and errors of noun (object) and verb (action) naming in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) and to determine whether children with SLI have a particularly large noun-verb performance gap. Method: Children with SLI, age-matched peers (AM), and…

Overexposure and underexposure of items in the bank are serious problems in operational computerized adaptive testing (CAT) systems. These exposure problems might result in item compromise, or point at a waste of investments. The exposure control problem can be viewed as a test assembly problem with multiple objectives. Information in the test has…

This study examined the performance of the maximum Fisher's information, the maximum posterior weighted information, and the minimum expected posterior variance methods for selecting items in a computerized adaptive testing system when the items were grouped in testlets. A simulation study compared the efficiency of ability estimation among the…

In a typical study comparing the relative efficiency of two item selection rules in computerized adaptive testing, the common result is that they simultaneously differ in accuracy and security, making it difficult to reach a conclusion on which is the more appropriate rule. This study proposes a strategy to conduct a global comparison of two or…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess the diagnostic accuracy of the Nonword Repetition Test (NRT; Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998) using a sample of 4- and 5-year-olds with and without specific language impairment (SLI) and to evaluate its feasibility for use in universal screening. Method: The NRT was administered to 29 children with SLI…