Alternative teacher preparation programs have triggered global debates. This study analysed 16 fellows of an alternative teacher preparation program who entered rural schools located in China--a high-stakes testing context--with a strong disposition toward quality-oriented education. Drawing on Bourdieu's sociology, we revealed four forms of…

Background: Online and blended learning need an appropriate assessment strategy which ensures academic integrity. During the pandemic, many universities have chosen for online proctoring. Although some earlier examples suggest that online proctoring may reduce cheating, the potential side-effects of proctoring are largely unknown. Objectives:…

Test equating requires collecting data to link the scores from different forms of a test. Problems arise when equating samples are not equivalent and the test forms to be linked share no common items by which to measure or adjust for the group nonequivalence. Using data from five operational test forms, we created five pairs of research forms for…

Q methodology (Q) offers a scientific way to study subjectivity, meaning people's viewpoints about a topic. The underlying assumption of Q is that when people share an experience, they do not necessarily form the same viewpoint about that experience. This is different from the use of Likert-scale surveys that report results using aggregate…

This case study reflects upon a mixed-methods exploratory study utilized by the Leadership in Times of Crisis Framework within the paradigm of pragmatism to survey 976 Minnesota teachers in April of 2020 to determine the demographic profile of teachers in Minnesota who were facing the COVID-19 pandemic and the greatest challenges in their…

Language test developers have a responsibility to ensure that their tests are accessible to test takers of various backgrounds and characteristics and also that they have the opportunity to perform to the best of their ability. This principle is widely recognised by educational and language testing associations in guidelines for the production and…

The advantages of administering an adaptive test battery, a collection of multiple adaptive subtests that are specifically tailored to examinees' abilities, include shortening the subtest length and maintaining the accuracy of individual subtest scores. The test battery can incorporate a range of subjects, though this study focused primarily on…

Dr. Tracey Burns is a Senior Analyst in the OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. She heads a portfolio of projects including Innovative Teaching for Effective Learning, 21st Century Children and Trends Shaping Education. Until recently she was also responsible for the OECD work on Governing Complex Education systems. Previous to…

This study attempted to check the impact of two dynamic assessment (DA) models on speaking CAF. DA, as opposed to static assessment, is conceived as an interactive approach to assessment that integrates teaching and testing into a unified instructional engagement. To achieve the goals of this research, a convenience sample of 90 upper-intermediate…

E-authentication is one of the key topics in the field of online education and e-assessment. This study was aimed at investigating the user experiences of students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) while developing the accessible e-authentication system for higher education institutions. Altogether, 15 students tested the…

It has been argued in the literature on (language) testing that any act of testing/assessment can impact: (1) educators' curriculum design; (2) teachers' teaching practices; and (3) students' learning behaviors. This quality of any given testing situation or act of assessment has been called washback, or backwash if you will. Washback falls into…

The "Raven's 2 Progressive Matrices Clinical Edition" (Raven's 2; Raven, Rust, Chan, & Zhou, 2018), published by NCS Pearson, is an individually administered nonverbal assessment of general cognitive ability developed to measure "educative abilities," defined as the ability to think clearly and solve complex problems in…

Virtual proctoring technology is credited with increasing the accessibility of exams by enabling students to participate in exams at any time and place. In this field experiment, students were randomly assigned to virtual proctoring or traditional on-campus examination to evaluate the effect, nature and timing of implementation barriers for online…

When tests are low stakes for examinees, meaning there are little to no personal consequences associated with test results, some examinees put little effort into their performance. To understand the causes and consequences of diminished effort, researchers correlate test-taking effort with other variables, such as test-taking emotions and test…

Automated essay scoring (AES), where natural language processing is applied to score written text, can underpin educational resources in blended and distance learning. AES performance has typically been reported in terms of correlation coefficients or agreement statistics calculated between a system and an expert human examiner. We describe the…