This paper describes a study of the computer essay-scoring program BETSY. While the use of computers in rating written scripts has been criticised in some quarters for lacking transparency or lack of fit with how human raters rate written scripts, a number of essay rating programs are available commercially, many of which claim to offer comparable…

Introductory gerontology courses have the potential to enhance student appreciation of aging issues. The effectiveness of such courses for informing views about individual aging is little studied. This study, using a quasi-experimental design, examines the impact of participation in an introductory course in aging on 158 undergraduate students in…

This study compared the impact of proctoring on the final course grades of community college students enrolled in distance education mathematics courses. The goal was to determine whether distance education students who are evaluated entirely online, in environments that are not proctored, receive grades that differ from distance education…

The uptake of CAA in UK higher education (HE) on a large scale lags behind the expectations of CAA specialists. A research project was undertaken with the aim of discovering and addressing the underlying reasons for this. The research was conducted according to Strauss and Corbin's (1998) prescription for grounded theory (GT) research. During…

In current psychological research, the analysis of data from computer-based assessments or experiments is often confined to accuracy scores. Response times, although being an important source of additional information, are either neglected or analyzed separately. In this article, a new model is developed that allows the simultaneous analysis of…

Computerized adaptive testing (CAT) has unsurpassable advantages over traditional testing. It has become the mainstream in large scale examinations in modern society. This paper gives a brief introduction to CAT including differences between traditional testing and CAT, the principles of CAT, psychometric theory and computer algorithms of CAT, the…

Previous studies have reported working memory deficits in autism, but this finding has been inconsistent. One possibility is that deficits in this domain may be present only when working memory load exceeds some limited capacity. High-functioning individuals with autism performed the CANTAB computerized test of spatial working memory. Individuals…

Many challenges exist for high-stakes testing programs offering continuous computerized administration. The automated assembly of test questions to exactly meet content and other requirements, provide uniformity, and control item exposure can be modeled and solved by mixed-integer programming (MIP) methods. A case study of the computerized…

Registered examinees for the GRE® General Test answered open-ended sentence-completion items. For half of the items, participants received immediate feedback on the correctness of their answers and up to two opportunities to revise their answers. A significant feedback-and-revision effect was found. Participants were able to correct many of their…

Research suggests that frequent, regularly scheduled quizzing is associated with pedagogically desirable outcomes such as higher performance on exams. It was hypothesized that requiring students to complete brief scheduled online quizzes on assigned reading material before class would also result in increases in both the number of in-class…

The Test of English as a Foreign Language[TM], better known as TOEFL[R], is designed to measure the English-language proficiency of people whose native language is not English. TOEFL scores are accepted by more than 6,000 colleges, universities, and licensing agencies in 130 countries. The test is also used by governments, and scholarship and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the correlation between online survey non-response and various demographic factors, including gender. Studies have shown that trends exist with regard to who responds to surveys, at least with regard to traditional modes of survey administration. Reports suggest that many demographic and other correlates…

Computer-assisted assessment offers many benefits over traditional paper methods. However, in transferring from one medium to another, it is crucial to ascertain the extent to which the new medium may alter the nature of traditional assessment practice or affect marking reliability. Whilst there is a substantial body of research comparing marking…

The current study compared student performance between paper-and-pencil testing (PPT) and computer-based testing (CBT) on a large-scale statewide end-of-course English examination. Analyses were conducted at both the item and test levels. The overall results suggest that scores obtained from PPT and CBT were comparable. However, at the content…

Weblogs are beginning to be used in educational settings in China, sending hope for changes in both learning and assessment. This article summarizes two recent Weblogs studies involving new ideas of student assessment in China. While these case studies focus on how Weblogs could facilitate innovation in the assessment field, they simultaneously…