Metacognition refers to students' knowledge and regulation of cognition, as well as their accuracy in predicting their academic performance. This study addressed two major questions: 1) how do metacognitive knowledge, regulation and accuracy differ across domains?, and 2) how do students' individual differences relate to their reported…

Canada's knowledge-based economy--especially the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)--continues to grow. Related changes in the economy, including shifts to globalized markets and an emphasis on innovation and technology, all mean that education is more and more an integral component of economic and social well-being.…

Learning progressions are used to describe how students' understanding of a topic progresses over time and to classify the progress of students into steps or levels. This study applies Item Response Theory (IRT) based methods to investigate how to design learning progression-based science assessments. The research questions of this study are: (1)…

Large numbers of students attending community college lack essential college success skills (motivation and study strategies). Many of these students do not complete their degree programs. Identifying learning and teaching methods that promote the development of lifelong learning skills in addition to content acquisition is essential. This…

This study examined the appropriateness of the anchor composition in a mixed-format test, which includes both multiple-choice (MC) and constructed-response (CR) items, using subpopulation invariance indices. Linking functions were derived in the nonequivalent groups with anchor test (NEAT) design using two types of anchor sets: (a) MC only and (b)…

Those items or test characteristics that are likely to result in differential item functioning (DIF) across accommodated test forms in statewide tests have received little attention. An examination of elementary-level student performance across accommodated test forms in a large-scale mathematics assessment revealed DIF variations by grades,…

This study sought to determine how students would describe their group-only cooperative testing experiences in terms of key elements of cooperative learning often cited in the literature. Written comments of 159 graduate students were analyzed and 26 related categories of comments were derived from 495 statements of students enrolled in two…

This article considers the design process for new formative history assessments. Over the course of 3 years, my colleagues from the Stanford History Education Group and I designed, piloted, and revised dozens of "History Assessments of Thinking" (HATs). As we created HATs, we sought to gather information about their cognitive validity,…

This study presents the results of the analysis of a group of teacher-made test questions for statistics courses at the university level. Teachers were asked to submit tests they had used in their previous two semesters. Ninety-seven tests containing 978 questions were gathered and classified according to the SOLO taxonomy (Biggs & Collis,…

The need for increased exam security, improved test formats, more flexible scheduling, better measurement, and more efficient administrative processes has caused testing agencies to consider converting the administration of their exams from paper-and-pencil to computer-based testing (CBT). Many decisions must be made in order to provide an optimal…

There has been increasing interest in using of web-based surveys--rather than paper based surveys--for collecting data on alcohol and other drug use in middle and high schools in the US. However, prior research has indicated that respondent confidentiality is an underlying concern with online data collection especially when computer-assisted…

This paper describes one of the first efforts by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to improve measurement at the lower end of the distribution, including measurement for students with disabilities (SD) and English language learners (ELLs). One way to improve measurement at the lower end is to introduce one or more…

People of Hispanic origin, including monolingual Spanish speakers, have experienced difficulty identifying with a race category on U.S. demographic surveys. As part of a larger research effort by the U.S. Census Bureau to improve race and Hispanic origin questions for the 2020 Census, we tested experimental versions of race and Hispanic origin…

Background/Context: The nature of the impact of state-mandated accountability testing on teachers' classroom practices remains contested. While many researchers argue that teachers change their teaching in response to mandated testing, others contend that the nature and degree of the impact of testing on teaching remains unclear. The research on…

Testing programs often use multiple test forms of the same test to control item exposure and to ensure test security. Although test forms are constructed to be as similar as possible, they often differ. Test equating techniques are those statistical methods used to adjust scores obtained on different test forms of the same test so that they are…