Conoley, Powers, and Gutkin (2020) have provided an assessment of the progress and lack thereof of school psychology as a profession toward school reformation, especially as related to their various earlier calls for changes in training and practice. Conoley and Gutkin especially (and I have been colleagues of both) have called for decades for an…

The use of computers in educational assessment is a widely explored territory. Several studies have been performed to show the effectiveness of computer-assisted assessment (CAA) and it has been accepted in various education sectors. However, due to the lack of sufficient infrastructure and other issues, the paper-based examination is still being…

I describe the motivation, structure, implementation, and student feedback of my mastery-based testing (MBT) system with a significant final exam component in Calculus I and II since 2016. Grades for each written assignment, quiz, and exam question were assigned on a Mastery/Progressing/Needs Improvement (M/P/NI) scale. Homework and quizzes could…

During this digital era, France, like many other countries, is undergoing a transition from paper-based assessments to digital assessments in education. There is a rising interest in technology-enhanced items which offer innovative ways to assess traditional competencies, as well as addressing problem solving skills, specifically in mathematics.…

Test-taking effort relates to performance on low-stakes tests; thus, researchers and assessment practitioners have investigated what influences students to put forth effort when completing these tests. Using a longitudinal design, we evaluated the often-cited effect of perceived test importance on test-taking effort. More specifically, a 29-item…

Experimental measures of working memory that minimize rehearsal and maximize attentional control best predict higher-order cognitive abilities. These tasks fundamentally differ from clinically administered span tasks, which do not control strategy use. Participants engaged in concurrent articulation (to limit rehearsal) or concurrent tapping (to…

Oral exams may be as old as academia itself, but they are now rare in STEM undergraduate courses in the U.S. Can they be resurrected to help students develop oral communication skills, foster a sense belonging to a scholarly community, and change how students approach learning? This past spring, as we transitioned to emergency remote learning, my…

Since it was formalized by Kane, the argument-based approach to validation has been promoted as the preferred method for validating interpretations and uses of test scores. Because validation is discussed in terms of arguments, and arguments are both interactive and social, the present review systematically examines the scholarly arguments which…

An essential feature of episodic memory is the ability to recall the multiple elements relating to one event from the multitude of elements relating to other, potentially similar events. Hippocampal pattern separation is thought to play a fundamental role in this process, by orthogonalizing the representations of overlapping events during…

In this essay, Sarah Stitzlein describes the democratic potential of parents choosing to opt out of school testing, explaining how they ought to engage in political dissent to best fulfill their responsibilities as citizens and to practice democracy on behalf of children and schools. Parents' decisions to opt out are often based on rights claims…

Standard setting is arguably one of the most subjective techniques in test development and psychometrics. The decisions when scores are compared to standards, however, are arguably the most consequential outcomes of testing. Providing licensure to practice in a profession has high stake consequences for the public. Denying graduation or forcing…

A common belief is that the Bookmark method is a cognitively simpler standard-setting method than the modified Angoff method. However, a limited amount of research has investigated panelist's ability to perform well the Bookmark method, and whether some of the challenges panelists face with the Angoff method may also be present in the Bookmark…

So far, modeling approaches for not-reached items have considered one single underlying process. However, missing values at the end of a test can occur for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, examinees may not reach the end of a test due to time limits and lack of working speed. On the other hand, examinees may not attempt all items and quit…

In this paper, we extracted content-based and structure-based features of text to predict human annotations for claims and nonclaims in argumentative essays. We compared Logistic Regression, Bernoulli Naive Bayes, Gaussian Naive Bayes, Linear Support Vector Classification, Random Forest, and Neural Networks to train classification models. Random…

While automated essay scoring (AES) can reliably grade essays at scale, automated writing evaluation (AWE) additionally provides formative feedback to guide essay revision. However, a neural AES typically does not provide useful feature representations for supporting AWE. This paper presents a method for linking AWE and neural AES, by extracting…