"Louisiana Believes" embraces the principle that all children can achieve at high levels, as evidenced in Louisiana's recent adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). "Louisiana Believes" also promotes the idea that Louisiana's educators should be empowered to make decisions to support the success of their students.…

The aim of this study was to assess the effect of the introduction of peer review processes on the quality of multiple-choice examinations in the first three years of an Australian medical course. The impact of the peer review process and overall quality assurance (QA) processes were evaluated by comparing the examination data generated in earlier…

Assessments developed and field tested for the mainstream student population may not be accessible for students with disabilities (SWDs) as a result of the impact of extraneous variables, including cognitive features, such as depth of knowledge required, grammatical and lexical complexity, lexical density, and textual/visual features. This study…

Measurement invariance is a common consideration in the evaluation of the validity and fairness of test scores when the tested population contains distinct groups of examinees, such as examinees receiving different forms of a translated test. Measurement invariance in polytomous items has traditionally been evaluated at the item-level,…

Successful exam composition can be a difficult task. Exams should not only assess student comprehension, but be learning tools in and of themselves. In a biotechnology course delivered to nonmajors at a business college, objective multiple-choice test questions often require students to choose the exception or "not true" choice. Anecdotal student…

Santelices and Wilson (2010) claimed to have addressed technical criticisms of Freedle (2003) presented in Dorans (2004a) and elsewhere. Santelices and Wilson's abstract claimed that their study confirmed that SAT[R] verbal items do function differently for African American and White subgroups. In this commentary, I demonstrate that the…

Sampling errors limit the accuracy with which forms can be linked. Limitations on accuracy are especially important in testing programs in which a very large number of forms are employed. Standard inequalities in mathematical statistics may be used to establish lower bounds on the achievable inking accuracy. To illustrate results, a variety of…

Most experts in the testing community have presumed that the $350 million promised by the U.S. Department of Education to support common assessments would promote those that made greater use of open-ended items capable of measuring higher-order critical-thinking skills. But as measurement experts consider the multitude of possibilities for an…

Current interest in measuring quality of life is generating interest in the construction of computerized adaptive tests (CATs) with Likert-type items. Calibration of an item bank for use in CAT requires collecting responses to a large number of candidate items. However, the number is usually too large to administer to each subject in the…

In this study, the authors extend the standard item response model with internal restrictions on item difficulty (MIRID) to fit polytomous items using cumulative logits and adjacent-category logits. Moreover, the new model incorporates discrimination parameters and is rooted in a multilevel framework. It is a nonlinear mixed model so that existing…

This article presents the author's response to the commentary essays by Charles Alderson and Fred Davidson on "Demystifying a Q-matrix for making diagnostic inferences about L2 reading skills" (Jang, 2009). The author stresses that their commentaries provides vital perspectives on the challenges to pushing the boundaries of current testing…

In this study, differential item functioning (DIF) methods utilizing 14 different matching variables were applied to assess DIF in the constructed-response (CR) items from 6 forms of 3 mixed-format tests. Results suggested that the methods might produce distinct patterns of DIF results for different tests and testing programs, in that the DIF…

Bernheim's ACSA, a less conventional measure of subjective well-being originally developed for use in a clinical setting, was applied to a sample of black South African township dwellers (n = 1,020) in the Eastern Cape Province. The Anamnestic Comparative Self Assessment is an experiential self-anchoring scale with concrete anchors (Bernheim in…

The Missionary Training Center (MTC), affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, needs a reliable and cost effective way to measure the oral language proficiency of missionaries learning Spanish. The MTC needed to measure incoming missionaries' Spanish language proficiency for training and classroom assignment as well as to…

"The Right Trajectory" brings to the forefront an often-overlooked voice in the debate about new state assessments developed in consortia: that of the best teachers in the country. This research suggests, despite challenges still to overcome, that these front-line experts believe that the new consortia tests are an improvement on the…