We present a tool for the creation and curation of C-tests. C-tests are an established tool in language proficiency testing and language learning. They require examinees to complete a text in which the second half of every second word is replaced by a gap. We support teachers and test designers in creating such tests through a web-based system…

The study developed a model of linguistic constructs to predict writing quality for college basic writers and analyzed how those constructs changed following instruction. Analysis used a corpus of argumentative essays from a quasi-experimental, instructional study with 252 students (MacArthur, Philippakos, & Ianetta, 2015) that found large…

Students with learning disabilities are often unable to master reading comprehension and often fail to acquire reading comprehension skills at basic levels as measured on reading achievement assessments. Reading intervention programs Compass Learning and SRA Corrective Reading teach students how to apply strategies to their reading to improve…

When educators provide students with opportunities to interact with educational technology such as floor-robots, it may: (a) increase students' awareness of new educational tools, and (b) enhance students' use and engagement with new technologies. This case study provided upper-elementary, Hispanic students with opportunities to engage in…

Elementary school students struggle in interpreting the equal sign as a symbol denoting equivalence. Although many have advocated using a pan-balance scale to help students develop this understanding, less is known about what features associated with this model support learning. To attempt to control and examine these features, the investigators…

Student academic burden exists to varying degrees throughout the world. To reach a comprehensive and unbiased understanding of the roles of academic burden, this paper explores academic burden from different viewpoints and summarizes existing assessment indexes for it. Factors correlated with student academic burden are examined and detailed…

This article examines the impact of personality traits, learning styles, gender, and online course factors (course difficulty, group affiliation, provided materials, etc.) in the academic success of students taking online courses and their overall success rate through traditional classes. Students' performance in the online learning environment is…

Until recently, many colleges provided academic support to students by requiring students to complete one or more developmental education courses in a subject area before they could enroll in college-level coursework. Now colleges have been experimenting with new approaches that accelerate students into college courses, including corequisite…

Learn how to keep the rigor and motivation alive in a remote learning or hybrid K-12 classroom. In this essential book, bestselling author Barbara R. Blackburn shares frameworks and tools to help you move online without compromising the rigor of your instruction. You'll learn: (1) how to create a remote culture of high expectations; (2) how to…

Expectations have been placed upon elementary teachers from the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts to guide students through close readings of informational and literary texts. This content analysis examined online close reading lesson plans to determine common objectives in elementary close reading lessons using literary text…

In this paper we tried to demonstrate the validity of C-Test using construct identification approach. In this approach to construct validation the factors which contribute to item difficulty are identified. The assumption is that the factors which make items difficult are actually the construct underlying the test. For the purposes of this study,…

This study aims to investigate how working memory (WM) performances and instructional strategy choices affect learners' complex cognitive task performance in online environments. Three different e-learning environments were designed based on Merrill's (2006a) model of instructional strategies. The lack of experimental research on his framework is…

The equating performance of two internal anchor test structures--miditests and minitests--is studied for four IRT equating methods using simulated data. Originally proposed by Sinharay and Holland, miditests are anchors that have the same mean difficulty as the overall test but less variance in item difficulties. Four popular IRT equating methods…

Learning and performance are not always commensurable. Conditions that maximize performance in the initial learning may not maximize learning in the longer term. I exploit this incommensurability to theoretically and empirically interrogate four possibilities for design: productive success, productive failure, unproductive success, and…

In item response theory (IRT), the invariance property states that item parameter estimates are independent of the examinee sample, and examinee ability estimates are independent of the test items. While this property has long been established and understood by the measurement community for IRT models, the same cannot be said for diagnostic…