In chemistry curricula, both the role of the laboratory program and the method of assessment used are subject to scrutiny and debate. The ability to identify clearly defined competencies for the chemistry laboratory program is crucial, given the numerous other disciplines that rely on foundation-level chemistry knowledge and practical skills. In…

The tablet project was undertaken in 2013 to explore the creation of an assessment to reveal English language learners' (ELLs') language capabilities in content area classes such as science. Such assessments could ideally be useful in multiple phases of the instructional process by providing information to learners, teachers, and other…

Student engagement appears to be associated with high-quality learning outcomes. Thus, it is important to measure whether students are engaging effectively in class. This article describes the development and validation of a measure of student engagement named the Student Course Engagement Scale (SCES). Exploratory and confirmatory analyses were…

In this article, the authors report on the results of a three-year study they conducted on assessment practices in general education courses at Duke University as part of a three-institution (Duke, the University of Kansas, and the University of Nebraska) research project funded by the Spencer Foundation. At all three institutions, researchers…

The aim of this study is to develop a scale in order to determine the attitudes of students in secondary school towards etiquette. The working group of the study consisted of 266 students who have attended three secondary schools in Erzurum. Factor analysis has been carried out by the obtained data to ensure validity. As a result of the factor…

As interest increases in mindfulness in education programs for youth, there is a need to develop reliable measures of the quality of program implementation. This paper describes the development and psychometric properties of a measure that can be used to assess and monitor quality of implementation of mindfulness programs/curricula in typical…

Assessment of student learning is crucial to capture accurately student understanding of core concepts and competencies as well as to provide relevant feedback for informing teaching and learning. Yet, many instructors in two-year and four-year undergraduate institutions rarely have pedagogical training to design fair instruction and assessments.…

This paper provides the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) community with information that may help maintain the validity and utility of the NAEP assessments for civics and U.S. history as revisions are planned to the NAEP…

This dissertation study explored the feasibility of using authenticated spoken texts to test L2 Chinese listening comprehension. The spoken texts used in the study were created using an "authenticating" technique, in which scripted spoken Chinese texts were infused with characteristics of real-world, unscripted spoken Chinese. In the…

The purpose of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) is to investigate the changing ways in which young people are prepared to undertake their roles as citizens across a wide range of countries. This assessment framework provides a conceptual underpinning for the international instrumentation for ICCS 2022. It needs to…

Assessment is a useful process as it provides various stakeholders (e.g., teachers, parents, government, employers) with information about students' competence in a particular subject area. However, for the information generated by assessment to be useful, it needs to support valid inferences. One factor that can undermine the validity of…

Focusing on the reflective exchanges of four test writers at an intensive language school within a public university, this study explored the effectiveness of a "lesson study" model on their professional development as test writers. Lesson study is a powerful tool for teachers' professional development and a modified version of it--a…

We provide evidence of validity for a newly developed diagnostic competence model of operation sense, by both (a) describing the theoretically substantiated development of the competence model in close association with its use within a large-scale formative assessment and (b) providing empirical evidence for the theoretically described cognitive…

An innovation in developing the Supports Intensity Scale--Children's Version (SIS-C) was the adoption of latent variable modeling approaches to norm development. In regard to translated versions of the SIS-C, the latent modeling approaches provided opportunities to leverage the large standardization sample generated in the United States (n=4,015)…

In response to concerns about using only standardized multiple-choice assessments, some school districts have moved to using alternative ratings of student achievement with authentic assessments. However, such assessments are often limited in terms of the psychometric validity data supporting their use. The present study mixed quantitative and…