The observed decline in academic performance among 15-year-old students, as reported by recent OECD-PISA surveys, alongside the democratisation of university admissions, points to a potential decrease in the marginal academic proficiency of incoming higher education students. Paradoxically, grades at the tertiary level have either remained stable…

Numerous studies have demonstrated that the retrieval of information through testing can enhance long term memory. Data has been less clear concerning the utility of concept mapping as an alternative retrieval practice technique. The study described here extended that research by matching the time for different study conditions, by utilizing…

Previous research has shown that phonological awareness is one of the most important prerequisites for early reading. Monitoring its development requires reliable, easy-to-use instruments especially in the last years of kindergarten. The present study aims to explore the potential for assessing phonological awareness and some of its subskills…

The recruitment and selection process are two of the most important human resource functions having a great impact on the growth and success of an organization as compared to other tasks such as retention, onboarding, leadership development, and managing talent. Stepping Stones is a project for scaling the early childhood development of children…

Machine learning-based automatic scoring faces challenges with imbalanced student responses across scoring categories. To address this, we introduce a novel text data augmentation framework that leverages GPT-4, a generative large language model specifically tailored for imbalanced datasets in automatic scoring. Our experimental dataset consisted…

Testing is an effective method to determine learning outcomes for knowledge and skills learning domains. The aim of this study was to examine the differences in test achievements among 50 Saudi female English major students at the College of Languages at Princess Nourah University in Riyadh. The tests were administered using two different methods:…

Access arrangements are the way in which awarding bodies for public examinations in England, such as the General Certificate of Secondary Education, make reasonable adjustments for students with special educational needs and disabilities. SENCos have expressed concerns about the onerous nature of managing requirements for access arrangements, both…

A common practical challenge is how to assign ability estimates to all incorrect and all correct response patterns when using item response theory (IRT) models and maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) since ability estimates for these types of responses equal -8 or +8. This article uses a simulation study and data from an operational K-12…

In the last decades, the development of computerized adaptive testing (CAT) has allowed more precise measurements with a smaller number of items. In this study, we develop an item bank (IB) to generate the adaptive algorithm and simulate the functioning of CAT to assess the domains of mathematical knowledge in Argentinian university students…

Over the past few years, several states have begun to explore or pilot different through-year assessments to serve as replacements to the traditional end-of-year summative assessments that are currently the predominant source of information used by states to meet federal accountability requirements. While there are several different assessment…

Demand for online courses continues to grow. To remain competitive, higher education institutions must accede to this demand while ensuring that academic rigor and integrity are maintained. The authors teach introductory Fundamentals of Financial and Managerial Accounting courses online. Previously, there was no proctoring of the exams. Prior…

We investigated three different approaches for quantifying individual change and reporting it back to persons: (a) the common change score, which is obtained by first computing scale scores from two consecutive measurements and then subtract these scores from one another, (b) the ad-hoc approach, which is similar to the former approach but uses…

This study introduces a new chi-square test statistic for testing the equality of response frequencies among distracters in multiple-choice tests. The formula uses the information from the number of correct answers and wrong answers, which becomes the basis of calculating the expected values of response frequencies per distracter. The method was…

Unproctored and teacher-proctored exams have been widely used to prevent cheating at many universities worldwide. However, no empirical studies have directly compared their effectiveness in promoting academic integrity in actual exams. To address this significant gap, in four preregistered field studies, we examined the effectiveness of…

This Perspective article expands on a working memory-dependent dual-process model, originally proposed by Zheng et al., to elucidate individual differences in the testing effect. This model posits that the testing effect comprises two processes: retrieval-attempt and post-retrieval re-encoding. We substantiate this model with empirical evidence…