This book is relevant for language testers, listening researchers, and oral proficiency teachers, in that it explores four broad themes related to the assessment of L2 listening ability: the use of authentic, real-world spoken texts; the effects of different speech varieties of listening inputs; the use of audio-visual texts; and assessing…

The IEA's International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) investigates the ways in which young people are prepared to undertake their roles as citizens in a range of countries in the second decade of the 21st century. ICCS 2016 is the second cycle of a study initiated in 2009. The ICCS 2016 user guide describes the content and format of…

This article reviews the "Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, Second Edition" (ADOS-2; Lord, Luyster, Gotham, & Guthrie, 2012; Lord, Rutter et al., 2012), a newly updated, semistructured, standardized measure of communication, social interaction, play/imagination, and restricted and/or repetitive behaviors published by Western…

The assessment of higher-education student learning outcomes is an important component in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of academic and general education programs. This study illustrates the application of diagnostic classification models, a burgeoning set of statistical models, in assessing student learning outcomes. To facilitate…

What happens when standardised literacy assessments travel globally? The paper presents an ethnographic account of adult literacy assessment events in rural Mongolia. It examines the dynamics of literacy assessment in terms of the movement and re-contextualisation of test items as they travel globally and are received locally by Mongolian…

The National Senior Certificate examination is the most important school examination in South Africa. Analysis of learners' performance in Mathematics in this examination is normally carried out and presented in terms of the percentage of learners who succeeded in the different bands of achievement. In some cases item difficulties are presented --…

Background: A potential problem of low-stakes large-scale assessments such as the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is low test-taking engagement. The present study pursued two goals in order to better understand conditioning factors of test-taking disengagement: First, a model-based approach was used to…

This study compared models of assessment structure for achieving differentiation across the range of examinee attainment in the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examination taken by 16-year-olds in England. The focus was on the "adjacent levels" model, where papers are targeted at three specific non-overlapping ranges of…

Many medical schools have adopted multiple mini-interviews (MMI) as an advanced selection tool. MMIs are expensive and used to test only a few dozen candidates per day, making it infeasible to develop a different test version for each test administration. Therefore, some items are reused both within and across years. This study investigated the…

It has long been argued that U.S. states' differential performance on nationwide assessments may reflect differences in students' opportunity to learn the tested content that is primarily due to variation in curricular content standards, rather than in instructional quality or educational investment. To quantify the effect of differences in…

This study aimed at constructing a criterion-reference test to measure the research and statistical competencies of graduate students at the Jordanian governmental universities, the test has to be in its first form of (50) multiple choice items, then the test was introduced to (5) arbitrators with competence in measurement and evaluation to…

Investigating the psychometric properties of a screening instrument for young children is necessary to ascertain its quality and accuracy. In light of the important role culture plays on human beliefs and parenting styles, a newly translated and adapted test needs to be studied. Evaluating outcomes on a translated version of a test may reveal…

This study investigated Korean college students' performance as measured by two different vocabulary assessment tools (the Productive Vocabulary Levels Test (PVLT) and the Productive Vocabulary Use Task (PVUT)) and the relationship these assessments have with students' writing proficiency. A total of 72 students participated in the study. The…

Differential item functioning (DIF) analysis is a key component in the evaluation of the fairness and validity of educational tests. Although it is often assumed that refinement of the matching criterion always provides more accurate DIF results, the actual situation proves to be more complex. To explore the effectiveness of refinement, we…

The major purpose of this study is to assess the conditions under which single scoring for constructed-response (CR) items is as effective as double scoring in the licensure testing context. We used both empirical datasets of five mixed-format licensure tests collected in actual operational settings and simulated datasets that allowed for the…