Written recall may be a powerful tool used to address reading deficiencies in China. With 180 students enrolled in a third-year English class at a large university in northeastern China, the present investigation studies the relationship between pausal and idea units used to codify written recalls, and it investigates whether the strength of the…

Given recent trends, there is a high probability that most university faculty members will either have the opportunity, or be required, to teach online at some point in their careers if they have not already. For a new professor just getting initiated in higher education or an established one whose school is considering online offerings, one of…

The Regulations of the Commissioner of Education provide that an intermediate-level science test is to be administered in Grade 8 to serve as a basis for determining students' need for academic intervention services in science. The New York State Grade 8 Intermediate-Level Science Test consists of two required components: a Written Test and a…

The goals of this rubric are to help State education leaders confirm areas of strength and identify areas of need and provide suggested steps for sharpening strategies, building capacity and enhancing reach. The rubric is divided into five sections, representing the five core areas of focus State Education Agencies (SEAs) should consider when…

The scoring instrument described in this article is based on a deconstruction of the seven sections of an American Psychological Association (APA)-style empirical research report into a set of learning outcomes divided into content-, expression-, and format-related categories. A double-weighting scheme used to score the report yields a final grade…

In recent years, there has been a growth in the use of rater cognitive data to inform test development and validity arguments. In this study, we examined differences in feature attention and categorisation between experienced and inexperienced raters for a college-level assessment of oral communication. The focus was two-fold: (a) rater cognition…

The Preschool-Wide Evaluation Tool (PreSET; Steed & Pomerleau, 2012) is published by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Company in Baltimore, MD. The PreSET purports to measure universal and program-wide features of early childhood programs' implementation fidelity of program-wide positive behavior intervention and support (PW-PBIS) and is,…

Grade descriptors, marking guides and exemplars are generally accepted to have a positive impact in assisting students' understanding of assessment task requirements and standards, but little is known about how students use such resources. This paper provides insight into the perceptions of first-year students of the usefulness of grade…

In this article, E. Matthew Schulz responds to Adam Wyse's article, "Construct Maps as a Foundation for Standard Setting." In doing so, he asserts that one of the most important ideas in Wyse's work is that information used in standard setting needs to be better represented through the use of graphics. However, he's not…

Cut-score setting processes are used to establish the passing standards for all kinds of tests in education and for credentialing. While experts use their best efforts to guide cut-score setting processes to generate valid and reliable results, cut-score participants often have a difficult time understanding the standard at which the cut score is…

The Speed DIAL-4 was developed from the Developmental Indicators for the Assessment of Learning, Fourth Edition (DIAL-4), a screening designed to identify children between the ages of 2 years, 6 months through 5 years, 11 months "who are in need of intervention or diagnostic assessment in the following areas: motor, concepts, language,…

Happiness is often measured in surveys using responses to a single question with a limited number of response options, such as "very happy", "fairly happy" and "not too happy". There is much variety in the wording and number of response options used, which limits comparability across surveys. To solve this problem, descriptive statistics of the…

Assessing student presentations can be made more reliable with video-recording and post-performance rating. Further, self assessment and peer assessment can aid in the learning process by students when using specific, easy-to-understand rubrics. A ten-year action research study involved video-recorded performance assessment tasks using a free,…

Automated scoring models for the "e-rater"® scoring engine were built and evaluated for the "GRE"® argument and issue-writing tasks. Prompt-specific, generic, and generic with prompt-specific intercept scoring models were built and evaluation statistics such as weighted kappas, Pearson correlations, standardized difference in…

This case study developed a collaborative approach to the selection of a Spanish language textbook. The collaborative process consisted of six steps, detailed in this article: team building, generating evaluation criteria, formulating a meaningful rubric, selecting prospective textbooks, calculating rubric results, and reflectively reviewing…