The effect of increased writing or planning time on a test of basic college level writing ability was studied. The essay portion of the New Jersey College Basic Skills Placement Test was given to students in nine New Jersey public colleges and three New Jersey public high schools. Each student wrote two essays on two different topics. The first…

Three different item-bank maintenance procedures were compared for the purpose of investigating their cumulative effects on a series of longitudinal equatings of tests measuring the same characteristic. Item data used resulted from Rasch one-parameter latent trait test calibrations. Comparison of the results in the various final banks were made.…

A case study of the Florida Teacher Certification Examination (FTCE) program was described to assist others launching the development of large scale item banks. FTCE has four subtests: Mathematics, Reading, Writing, and Professional Education. Rasch calibrated item banks have been developed for all subtests except Writing. The methods used to…

The feasibility of creating an item bank from a teacher-made test was examined in two comparable sections of a graduate-level introductory measurement course. The 67-item midterm examination contained multiple-choice and master matching items, which required higher level cognitive processes such as application and analysis. The feasibility of…

In support of research examining relationships between learner characteristics and the quality of online discussions, this paper surveys different methods for evaluating discussions. The paper will present coding methods used in our own research as well as methods used by others interested in quality online discussions. Key topics include what…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between achievement and the quantity of online course materials that students printed and the frequency with which they reported using them. One hundred thirty-two graduate students from one of 11 hybrid or online classes voluntarily completed a self-report survey asking how much they…

Two experiments assessed the effects of text cohesion and schema availability on sixth grade children's comprehension of social studies passages that varied in vocabulary difficulty. The purpose of the experiments was to test the compensation hypothesis within the interactive theory of reading, which assumes that reading involves many…

This study examines children's understanding of temporal markers and explores a strategy for teaching such understanding when it is absent. The original sample for this study consisted of 22 first graders and 85 kindergarten children. All subjects were individually pretested with the Temporal Marker Test (TMT) which evaluates performance on eight…

Teachers' guidebooks that accompanied commonly used kindergarten, first, and second grade language arts kits or textbooks were reviewed to determine what listening tasks and thinking skills were stressed. Five first grade, five second grade, and two kindergarten kits/textbooks were selected for review. Examination of these materials clearly…

Adjunct questions are test-like items interspersed at regular intervals, preceding or following prose passages, with the intention of increasing subsequent learning. In this state-of-the-art review, studies which include three major variables--age, ability, and question complexity level--are examined to determine whether a particular combination…

The efficacy of employing subsets of items from a calibrated item pool to estimate the Rasch model person parameters was investigated. Specifically, the degree of invariance of Rasch model ability-parameter estimates was examined across differing collections of simulated items. The ability-parameter estimates were obtained from a simulation of…

For Title I evaluations, it may be appropriate to test out-of-level; that is, to override publisher's recommendations concerning the difficulty, length, and content appropriate for a particular grade. It is seldom necessary, however, to move more than one grade down. If the mean is substantially higher than the median, then some pupils will have…

Test questions were phrased according to different sentence structures in a study of the complexity level of items for 220 third-grade children. Both the sensitivity of wh-questions (who, what, where, etc.) as a dependent variable and differences between wh-questions eliciting subject and predicate nouns were investigated. Effects of paraphrase…

Three methods of item selection were used to select sets of 38 items from a 50-item verbal analogies test and the resulting item sets were compared for internal consistency, standard errors of measurement, item difficulty, biserial item-test correlations, and relative efficiency. Three groups of 1,500 cases each were used for item selection. First…

Six approaches to assessing test item bias were examined: transformed item difficulty, point biserial correlations, chi-square, factor analysis, one parameter item characteristic curve, and three parameter item characteristic curve. Data sets for analysis were generated by a Monte Carlo technique based on the three parameter model; thus, four…