Following employers' criticisms and recent societal developments, policymakers and educators have called for students to develop a range of generic skills such as critical thinking ("twenty-first century skills"). So far, such skills have typically been assessed by student self-reports or with multiple-choice tests. An alternative…

Touch-screen tablets are used in the classroom for assessment. Little is known about the psychometric properties of tablet-based assessments. This study examined the validity and reliability of an expressive and receptive assessment app designed to measure literacy skills. Children (N = 45; 3-5 years) completed the app assessments for alphabet and…

Research has found that the "a"-stratified item selection strategy (STR) for computerized adaptive tests (CATs) may lead to insufficient use of high a items at later stages of the tests and thus to reduced measurement precision. A refined approach, unequal item selection across strata (USTR), effectively improves test precision over the…

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is a change in liking of neutral conditioned stimuli (CS) following pairings with positive or negative stimuli (unconditioned stimulus, US). A dissociation has been reported between US expectancy and CS evaluation in extinction learning: When CSs are presented alone subsequent to CS-US pairings, participants cease to…

This paper discusses the results of two experiments assessing undergraduate students' beliefs about the random nature of molecular environments. Experiment 1 involved the implementation of a pilot adaptive assessment (n = 773) and focus group discussions with undergraduate students enrolled in first- through third-year biology courses; experiment…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties and measurement invariance of a web-based, self-administered battery of assessments of social-emotional comprehension called "SELweb." Assessment modules measured children's ability to read facial expressions, infer others' perspectives, solve social problems, delay…

Studies have shown that item difficulty can vary significantly based on the context of an item within a test form. In particular, item position may be associated with practice and fatigue effects that influence item parameter estimation. The purpose of this research was to examine the relevance of item position specifically for assessments used in…

This technical report describes a web-based platform for assessing school engagement in its three dimensions (emotional, behavioural and cognitive) and the contextual variables which influence engagement (family, teachers and peers). Students answer two questionnaires through the platform. Results are shown online through individual reports on…

Nearly two dozen states now administer online exams to deliver testing to K-12 students. These tests have real consequences: their results feed into accountability systems, which have been used for more than a decade to hold schools and districts accountable for their students' learning. We examine the rollout of computer-based testing in…

One significant challenge in the field of measuring ability is measuring the current ability of a learner while they are learning. Many forms of inference become computationally complex in the presence of time-dependent learner ability, and are not feasible to implement in an online context. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach which can…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties and measurement invariance of a web-based, self-administered battery of assessments of social-emotional comprehension called "SELweb." Assessment modules measured children's ability to read facial expressions, infer others' perspectives, solve social problems, delay…

The new research results on the online- testing method in the Latvian education system for a learning process assessment are presented. Data mining is a very important field in education because it helps to analyse the data gathered in various researches and to implement the changes in the education system according to the learning methods of…

This pilot study examines digital SAT® score relationships with first-year college performance. Results show that digital SAT scores predict college performance as well as paper and pencil SAT scores, and that digital SAT scores meaningfully improve our understanding of a student's readiness for college above high school grade point average…

Given the ongoing development of computer-based tasks, there has been increasing interest in modelling students' behaviour indicators from log file data with contextual variables collected via questionnaires. In this work, we apply a latent regression model to analyse the relationship between latent constructs (i.e., performance, speed, and…

This study investigates whether re-thinking the separation of lexis and grammar in language testing could lead to more valid inferences about proficiency across modes. As argued by Römer, typical scoring rubrics ignore important information about proficiency encoded at the lexis-grammar interface, in particular how the co-selection of lexical and…