Assessment is often used to hold schools and teachers accountable for student learning. Assessment instruments are used as tools to guide curriculum choices and lesson plans, from districts to individual students. In any discipline, knowing what students know and what they have learned following a lesson is important on multiple levels. This is…

Despite the increasing importance of language testing, technology design matters related to testing have hardly been addressed in academic research, yet not enough has been written on test-taking anxiety related to computerized speaking tests. Although students nowadays are digital natives, in our experience they seem to experience a significant…

Educators, parents, and the public depend on accurate, valid, reliable, and timely information about student academic performance. Testing irregularities--breaches of test security or improper administration of academic testing--undermine efforts to use those data to improve student achievement. Unfortunately, there have been high-profile and…

The Internet has made it possible for teachers to administer online assessments with affordability and ease. However, little is known about Japanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students' attitudes of internet-based tests (IBTs). Therefore, this study aimed to measure the perceptions of IBTs among Japanese English language learners with the…

As part of the Race to the Top initiative, the United States Department of Education made nearly 1 billion dollars available in State Educational Technology grants with the goal of ramping up school technology. One result of this effort is that states, districts, and schools across the country are using computerized assessments to measure their…

Recent reforms in educational testing have brought many changes in approaches to accessibility and accommodations. These new approaches provide an opportunity for students who may not have received accommodations in the past to now benefit from needed accessibility features that are built into the testing platform. This Brief presents information…

This article provides a brief overview and comparison of three matching approaches in forming comparable groups for a study comparing test administration modes (i.e., computer-based tests [CBT] and paper-and-pencil tests [PPT]): (a) a propensity score matching approach proposed in this article, (b) the propensity score matching approach used by…

Though the testing-effect can be boosted by including a restudy phase after answering test questions, we do not know precisely why it does so. One possible explanation is being tested here. The present study measured attention allocation during initial reading and rereading with a remote eye tracker to gain information on the cognitive processes…

This article introduces practitioners and researchers to the topic of missing data in the context of differential item functioning (DIF), reviews the current literature on the issue, discusses implications of the review, and offers suggestions for future research. A total of nine studies were reviewed. All of these studies determined what effect…

This paper provides an empirical account of commercial genetic testing in China. Commercial predictive genetic testing has emerged and is developing rapidly in China, but there is no strict and effective governance. This raises a number of serious social and ethical issues as a consequence of the enormous potential market for such tests. The paper…

Knowledge of mechanisms is critical for causal reasoning. We contrasted two possible organizations of causal knowledge--an interconnected causal "network," where events are causally connected without any boundaries delineating discrete mechanisms; or a set of disparate mechanisms--causal "islands"--such that events in different…

Briggs and Peck [in "Using Learning Progressions to Design Vertical Scales That Support Coherent Inferences about Student Growth"] call for greater care in the conceptualization of the target attributes of students, or "what it is that is growing from grade to grade." In particular, they argue that learning progressions can…

Although retrieval often enhances subsequent memory (the testing effect), a negative testing effect has recently been documented in which prior retrieval harms later recall compared with restudying. The negative testing effect was predicated on the negative generation effect and the item-specific-relational framework. The present experiments…

Sign language test development is a relatively new field within sign linguistics, motivated by the practical need for assessment instruments to evaluate language development in different groups of learners (L1, L2). Due to the lack of research on the structure and acquisition of many sign languages, developing an assessment instrument poses…

Four experiments investigated whether the testing effect also applies to the acquisition of problem-solving skills from worked examples. Experiment 1 (n?=?120) showed no beneficial effects of testing consisting of "isomorphic" problem solving or "example recall" on final test performance, which consisted of isomorphic problem…