The purpose of the present study was to examine factors that influence strategic flexibility in computational estimation for Chinese- and Canadian-educated adults. Strategic flexibility was operationalized as the percentage of trials on which participants chose the problem-based procedure that best balanced proximity to the correct answer with…

Problem Statement: There have been many attempts to research the effective assessment of writing ability, and many proposals for how this might be done. In this sense, rater reliability plays a crucial role for making vital decisions about testees in different turning points of both educational and professional life. Intra-rater and inter-rater…

For computerized adaptive tests (CATs) to work well, they must have an item pool with sufficient numbers of good quality items. Many researchers have pointed out that, in developing item pools for CATs, not only is the item pool size important but also the distribution of item parameters and practical considerations such as content distribution…

Motivated by the need to facilitate Net Generation students' information literacy (IL), or more specifically, to promote student understanding of legitimate, effective use of Web-based resources, this exploratory study investigated how analyzing, writing, posting, and monitoring Wikipedia entries might help students develop critical…

The predictive validity and accuracy of an oral reading fluency (ORF) measure for a statewide assessment in English language arts was examined for second-grade native English speakers (NESs) and English learners (ELs) with varying levels of English proficiency. In addition to comparing ELs with native English speakers, the impact of English…

The study compared the effects of two types of form-focused written feedback--direct corrective feedback (DCF) and metalinguistic explanation (ME) given to the whole class--on Japanese university students' accuracy of use of two grammatical structures: indefinite article and the hypothetical conditional. Both types of feedback were given with…

Can online collaboration yield a positive effect on academic writing in a foreign language? If so, what exactly is the added value, compared to individual writing, and (how) does it translate to better output? These are the central questions addressed in this paper. L2 writing research has long highlighted the benefits of collaboration in terms of…

Two experiments tested whether Russian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are sensitive to gender agreement when performing a gender decision task. In Experiment 1, the presence of overt gender agreement between verbs and/or adjectival modifiers and postverbal subject nouns memory was varied. In Experiment 2, agreement…

This study investigates the potential for linguistic microfeatures related to length, complexity, cohesion, relevance, topic, and rhetorical style to predict L2 writing proficiency. Computational indices were calculated by two automated text analysis tools (Coh- Metrix and the Writing Assessment Tool) and used to predict human essay ratings in a…

Computer technology made its way into writing instruction and assessment with spelling and grammar checkers decades ago, but more recently it has done so with automated essay evaluation (AEE) and diagnostic feedback. And although many programs and tools have been developed in the last decade, not enough research has been conducted to support or…

Out-of-school time (OST) youth programs are inherently difficult to assess. They are often very dynamic: Many youth interact with one another and with staff members in various physical environments. Despite the challenge, measuring quality is critical to help program directors and policy makers identify where to improve and how to support those…

This study investigates a novel approach to automatically assessing essay quality that combines natural language processing approaches that assess text features with approaches that assess individual differences in writers such as demographic information, standardized test scores, and survey results. The results demonstrate that combining text…

All native speakers of Arabic read in a language variety that is remarkably distant from the one they use in everyday speech. The study tested the impact of this distance on reading accuracy and fluency by comparing reading of Standard Arabic (StA) words, used in StA only, versus Spoken Arabic (SpA) words, used in SpA too, among Arabic native…

Findings are presented from a two-year longitudinal study involving the "Quick60 Foundation" programme for beginning readers. This programme is a 32 week whole-class literacy curriculum that systematically and explicitly teaches key early literacy skills. End of Year 2 literacy performances of students receiving this programme during…

REACH is a targeted reading support programme designed to improve reading accuracy and comprehension in pupils with reading difficulties in Years 7 and 8. It is based on research by the Centre for Reading and Language at York and is delivered by specially trained teaching assistants (TAs). This evaluation tested two REACH interventions, one based…