Big data analytics are prevalent in fields like business, engineering, public health, and the physical sciences, but social scientists are slower than their peers in other fields in adopting this new methodology. One major reason for this is that traditional statistical procedures are typically not suitable for the analysis of large and complex…

Assessment specialists expend a great deal of energy to promote valid inferences from test scores gathered in low-stakes testing contexts. Given the indirect effect of perceived test importance on test performance via examinee effort, assessment practitioners have manipulated test instructions with the goal of increasing perceived test importance.…

The purpose of this study was to address the effectiveness of autonomy support and a lottery-based reward in enhancing test performance and test-taking motivation on a low-stakes test. Two hundred and forty-six university students were randomly assigned to three groups -- lottery, autonomy support and control -- and took a mathematics test.…

This article reports on an experimental study on the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in second language European Portuguese by Chinese native speakers. It focuses on the role of resumption, mandatory in prepositional relative clauses in Chinese (the native language of the learners) and non-conventional in European Portuguese (the…

This study attempts to explain a systematic phenomenon that has been described in interlanguage grammars crosslinguistically: Null-Prep, which consists of omitting the obligatory preposition in certain movement constructions. We propose that Null-Prep is not related to lack of knowledge of "wh"-movement, as previously assumed, but to…

This study reports syllable position effects on second language (L2) Portuguese speech perception, revealing that L2 segmental learning may be prone to an influence from the suprasegmental level. The results show that first language (L1) Mandarin learners had diminished performance on the discrimination between the target Portuguese liquids (/l/…

The COVID-19 pandemic forced a rapid shift to online learning, revealing significant challenges for elementary students' foundational academic and emotional development. This study explores the impact of remote learning on students with pre-existing--yet unidentified--attention and mood-related challenges, and aims to shed light on the academic…

Violations of normality and homogeneity are common in educational data. When this occurs, the use of parametric statistics may be inappropriate. A generalized form of nonparametric analyses based on the Puri and Sen L statistic provides an alternative approach. Using a chi-square distribution, this technique is easy to apply and has significant…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cooperative Extension professionals, like many others, were tasked with quickly adapting to accommodate limited face-to-face interactions. The pandemic necessitated that Extension educators leverage online resources to deliver tailored programming in informative and innovative ways while providing engaging, hands-on…

This qualitative study investigated the washback of performance-based assessment used by three English language teachers in Hokkaido, Japan, each of whom implemented their own course-specific assessments. The study employed qualitative research of an in-depth interview with 15 students and a self-reflective method from 3 teachers. Teachers…

This study examines the range of cognitive processes assessed in the English language reading literacy test as part of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination (HKDSE), the secondary school exit test in Hong Kong. Prior studies have suggested that higher order cognitive processes are often undermined in high-stakes tests and…

Postsecondary entrance and placement tests provide critical information that shapes the trajectory of the transition from secondary to postsecondary education. Test accommodations can play an important role in reducing barriers that deaf students face during high-stakes testing. For deaf students, decisions about access and accommodations for…

Researchers have identified accommodations as important determinants of academic performance among students with learning disabilities (LD) in post-secondary education. The purpose of the current study was to examine the willingness of university faculty members in one northern university in Israel to provide accommodations for students with LD,…

This study explores the effects of the shift to emergency remote teaching on assessment practices due to COVID-19 lockdown. A total of 936 Spanish teachers from all educational levels ranging from early childhood to university participated in this nationwide survey. Four aspects were explored: (1) changes in the use of assessment instruments (e.g.…

Most psycholinguistic models of reading aloud and of speech production do not include linguistic representations more fine-grained than the phoneme, despite the fact that the available empirical evidence suggests that feature-level representations are activated during reading aloud and speech production. In a series of masked-priming experiments…