Grades are a staple of education and a gateway to future career opportunities. Yet, grading practices can (re)produce inequities and cause students to feel inadequate and unmotivated. Alternative grading practices may address these problems, but these strategies are often time intensive and impractical in larger classroom settings. In this study,…

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a heterogeneous condition associated with differences in functional neural connectivity relative to neurotypical (NT) peers. Language-based functional connectivity represents an ideal context in which to characterize connectivity because language is heterogeneous and linked to core features in ASD, and NT language…

Health Literacy (HL) refers to personal competencies for accessing, understanding, appraising, and applying health-relevant information in order to make sound decisions in everyday life that promote the prevention of bad and maintenance of good health. Schools are seen as promising intervention settings for promoting these skills in adolescents.…

In its 40th year, "Language Testing" journal has served as the flagship journal for scholars, researchers, and practitioners in the field of language testing and assessment. This viewpoint piece, written from the perspective of an emerging scholar, discusses two possible future trends based on evidence going back to the very first issue…

Despite the prominence of fitness testing in school physical education (PE), there is a sparsity of research examining the antecedents of students' affective experiences during fitness testing lessons. This study aimed to investigate the associations among task- and ego-involving motivational climates, perceived physical competence, physical…

The OECD's Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) 2023 represents the largest global initiative to gather comparable data on the development of social and emotional skills among 10- and 15-year-old students. In the 2023 cycle of SSES, 16 sites implemented an assessment of students' social and emotional skills and collected contextual…

The Measures for Early Success Initiative aims to reimagine the landscape of early learning assessments for the millions of 3- to 5-year-olds enrolled in Pre-K, so that more equitable data can be applied to meaningfully support and strengthen early learning experiences for all young children. This document outlines design parameters for child…

In 2017, the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) funded Mathematica to conduct the Infant and Toddler Teacher and Caregiver Competencies (ITTCC) project. The project aims to examine existing efforts across states, institutions of higher education, professional organizations, and…

The authors, in the theoretical part of the paper, define and explain the concept of emotional competence, as well as skills that should be developed and strengthened within the mentioned concept. Also, the importance of emotional competence in exam situations for the academic success of students has been presented, which is supported by the…

Being overconfident in one's abilities is connected to poor self-judgment and it is essential to find ways how to reduce this phenomenon. The aim of the study was to research whether the act of taking a reading literacy test can be an effective means of reducing the overconfidence effect in the sample of Slovak teachers. Using purposive sampling…

The purpose of this study was to examine differences in student perceptions of instructor and course characteristics for courses that students deemed to be high in learning versus high in enjoyment. Realizing that students differ from faculty in how they view the traits of a highly effective instructor, the authors created a survey of student…

This paper explores the impact of test-taking conditions on the quality of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) assessment. Interviewers record information about the room of assessment and interruptions that occurred during each interview. These observations, along with information on interviewer assignment…

Evaluation professionals need to be nimble and innovative in their approaches in order to be relevant and provide useful evidence to decision-makers, stakeholders, and society in the crowded public policy landscape. In this article, we offer serious games as a method that can be employed by evaluators to address three persisting challenges in…

In the assessment of speaking, a psycholinguistically based speaking construct has predominated. In this paper, we argue for the integration of the construct of interactional competence (IC) in speaking assessments to broaden the range of defensible inferences from speaking tests. IC emphasizes the co-constructed nature of interaction and enables…

To conduct this qualitative dissertation study, a phenomenological approach was utilized. The purpose of the study was to examine the perspectives of highly motivated, economically disadvantaged, middle school students to discover the factors that they identified as integral to their overall development and their intrinsic motivation, over time,…