Background: Although on-demand testing is being increasingly used in many areas of assessment, it has not been adopted in high stakes examinations like the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) and General Certificate of Education Advanced level (GCE A level) offered by awarding organisations (AOs) in the UK. One of the major issues…

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is a state-led consortium designed to create next-generation assessments that, compared to traditional K-12 assessments, more accurately measure student progress toward college and career readiness. The PARCC assessments are aligned to the Common Core State Standards…

To date, exposure control procedures that are designed to control test overlap in computerized adaptive tests (CATs) are based on the assumption of item sharing between pairs of examinees. However, in practice, examinees may obtain test information from more than one previous test taker. This larger scope of information sharing needs to be…

The first college mathematics course a student enrolls in is often affected by performance on a college mathematics placement test. Yet validity evidence of mathematics placement tests remains limited, even for nationally standardized placement tests, and when it is available usually consists of examining a student's subsequent performance in…

The Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression (CES-D) scale is a well-known self-report instrument that is used to measure depressive symptomatology. Respondents who take the full-length version of the CES-D are administered a total of 20 items. This article investigates the use of curtailment and stochastic curtailment (SC), two sequential…

Validity evidence based on test content is important for educational tests to demonstrate the degree to which they fulfill their purposes. Most content validity studies involve subject matter experts (SMEs) who rate items that comprise a test form. In computerized-adaptive testing, examinees take different sets of items and test "forms"…

The ability estimation procedure is one of the most important components in a computerized adaptive testing (CAT) system. Currently, all CATs that provide K-12 student scores are based on the item response theory (IRT) model(s); while such application directly violates the assumption of independent sample of a person in IRT models because ability…

This paper proposes two new item selection methods for cognitive diagnostic computerized adaptive testing: the restrictive progressive method and the restrictive threshold method. They are built upon the posterior weighted Kullback-Leibler (KL) information index but include additional stochastic components either in the item selection index or in…

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…

A fundamental social justice issue worldwide is how to meet the needs of all learners, especially those with special needs who historically have faced discrimination, exclusion, and oppression due to special needs (physical, cognitive, or behavioral dimensions). This article focuses on the key questions that researchers interested in improving…

This article presents the author's commentary on "Updating the Duplex Design for Test-Based Accountability in the Twenty-First Century," in which Isaac I. Bejar and E. Aurora Graf propose the application of a test design--the duplex design (which was proposed in 1988 by Bock and Mislevy) for application in current accountability assessments.…

A rapidly expanding arena for item response theory (IRT) is in attitudinal and health-outcomes survey applications, often with polytomous items. In particular, there is interest in computer adaptive testing (CAT). Meeting model assumptions is necessary to realize the benefits of IRT in this setting, however. Although initial investigations of…

Some brand names are used generically to describe an entire class of products that perform the same function. "Kleenex," "Xerox," "Thermos," and "Band-Aid" are good examples. The term "computerized adaptive testing" (CAT) is similar in that it is often applied uniformly across a diverse family of testing methods. Although the various members of…

A new metric, Word Maturity, estimates the development by individual students of knowledge of every word in a large corpus. The metric is constructed by Latent Semantic Analysis modeling of word knowledge as a function of the reading that a simulated learner has done and is calibrated by its developing closeness in information content to that of a…

When power tests include a time limit, it is important to assess the possibility of speededness for examinees. Past research on differential speededness has examined gender and ethnic subgroups in the United States on paper and pencil tests. When considering the needs of a global audience, research regarding different native language speakers is…