The instructions in this manual explain the responsibilities of school administrators for the New York State Testing Program (NYSTP) Grades 3-8 English Language Arts and Mathematics Tests. School administrators must be thoroughly familiar with the contents of the manual, and the policies and procedures must be followed as written so that testing…

Modern societies need higher education systems that are strongly grounded on scientific knowledge and evidence-based teaching tools. This laboratory-based study extended Chase and Houmanfar (2009), examining the effects of basic and elaborate feedback on participants' performance measured with two sets of tests administered after a college-level…

Purpose: Fitness testing is common within physical education, but there has been considerable debate about the pedagogical purpose and potential psychological implications of this practice. The aim of this study was to conduct a pilot experimental study to determine the impact of traditional fitness testing approaches on the body image,…

Several states in the US have removed time limits on their state assessments. In Indiana, where this study takes place, the state assessment is both untimed during the testing window and allows unlimited breaks during the testing session. Using grade 3 and 8 math and English state assessment data, in this paper we focus on time used for testing…

Viable methods for the identification of item misfit or Differential Item Functioning (DIF) are central to scale construction and sound measurement. Many approaches rely on the derivation of a limiting distribution under the assumption that a certain model fits the data perfectly. Typical DIF assumptions such as the monotonicity and population…

Using item-response theory to model rater effects provides an alternative solution for rater monitoring and diagnosis, compared to using standard performance metrics. In order to fit such models, the ratings data must be sufficiently connected in order to estimate rater effects. Due to popular rating designs used in large-scale testing scenarios,…

This study aims to see the effect of student perceptions on web-based character assessment on the results of student character assessment. The population in this study was a junior high school in Batanghari Regency with a sample of 322 students using the purposive sampling technique. Quantitative methods are used in this study with descriptive and…

In mixed methods approaches, statistical models are used to identify "nested" cases for intensive, small-n investigation for a range of purposes, including notably the examination of causal mechanisms. This article shows that under a commonsense interpretation of causal effects, large-n models allow no reliable conclusions about effect…

We introduce a short answer scoring engine made up of an ensemble of deep neural networks and a Latent Semantic Analysis-based model to score short constructed responses for a large suite of questions from a national assessment program. We evaluate the performance of the engine and show that the engine achieves above-human-level performance on a…

To detect differential item functioning (DIF), Rasch trees search for optimal split-points in covariates and identify subgroups of respondents in a data-driven way. To determine whether and in which covariate a split should be performed, Rasch trees use statistical significance tests. Consequently, Rasch trees are more likely to label small DIF…

Background: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have touted the idea of democratizing education, but soon enough, this utopian idea collided with the reality of finding sustainable business models. In addition, the promise of harnessing interactive and social web technologies to promote meaningful learning was only partially successful. And…

This study presents the results of a sequential explanatory mixed-method approach to investigate the Iranian English language non-gainers of a computerized dynamic reading comprehension test (CDRT) by utilizing a learning style survey. Using an interventionist approach, the researchers used the CDRT software to explore English learners' perceptual…

Multidimensional scoring evaluates each constructed-response answer from more than one rating dimension and/or trait such as lexicon, organization, and supporting ideas instead of only one holistic score, to help students distinguish between various dimensions of writing quality. In this work, we present a bilevel learning model for combining two…

The challenges of teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic were multiple and accompanied by dramatic changes in the experiences of students, faculty, and administration. However, this year also offered us an opportunity to be creative and generate new ideas to solve problems we knew about but often did not have enough of a reason to make significant…

Practice testing is a powerful tool to consolidate long-term retention of studied information, facilitate subsequent learning of new information, and foster knowledge transfer. However, practitioners frequently express the concern that tests are anxiety-inducing and that their employment in the classroom should be minimized. The current review…