The modern web-based technology greatly popularizes computer-administered testing, also known as online testing. When these online tests are administered continuously within a certain "testing window," many items are likely to be exposed and compromised, posing a type of test security concern. In addition, if the testing time is limited,…

Like performance-enhancing drugs inflating apparent athletic achievements, several common social science practices contribute to the production of illusory results. In this article, we examine the processes that lead to illusory findings and describe their consequences. We borrow from an approach used increasingly by other disciplines--the norm of…

Recent studies of naturalistic face-to-face communication have demonstrated coordination patterns such as the temporal matching of verbal and non-verbal behavior, which provides evidence for the proposal that verbal and non-verbal communicative control derives from one system. In this study, we argue that the observed relationship between verbal…

Purpose: This article focuses on toddlers' revisions of the sentence subject and tests the hypothesis that subject diversity (i.e., the number of different subjects produced) increases the probability of subject revision. Method: One-hour language samples were collected from 61 children (32 girls) at 27 months. Spontaneously produced, active…

Education systems are increasingly being called upon to implement new technology-based assessment systems that generate efficiencies, better meet changing stakeholder expectations, or fulfil new assessment purposes. These assessment systems require coordinated organisational effort to implement and can be expensive in time, skill and other…

Few would argue about the growing importance of information and communication technology (ICT) literacy as relatively new and distinct skills that affect educational attainment, workforce readiness, and lifelong learning. There is less agreement, however, as to what ICT literacy skills and knowledge are, how best to measure them, and strategies…

The aim of the study was to examine mathematics teacher candidates' strategies used in solving non-routine problems. The research was carried out with 104 mathematics teacher candidates studying at a state university during the first term of the 2014-2015 academic year in Turkey. Data was collected through Problem Solving Test which was consisted…

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…