This classroom experiment investigates the effects of adding representational pictures to multiple-choice and constructed-response test items to understand the role of the response format for the multimedia effect in testing. Participants were 575 fifth- and sixth-graders who answered 28 science test items--seven items in each of four experimental…

Mathematical learning difficulty (MLD) is prevalent in the development of mathematical abilities. Previous interventions for children with MLD have focused on number sense or basic mathematical skills. This study investigated whether mathematical performance of fifth grade children with MLD could be improved by developing knowledge structures by…

We use a natural experiment to show that the presence of an external examiner has both a direct and an indirect negative effect on the performance of monitored classes in standardized educational tests. The direct effect is the difference in the test performance between classes of the same school with and without external examiners. The indirect…

Recent studies indicate that examiners make a number of intentional and unintentional errors when administering reading assessments to students. Because these errors introduce construct-irrelevant variance in scores, the fidelity of test administrations could influence the results of evaluation studies. To determine how assessment fidelity is…

This research investigated the impact of personalizing mathematical word problems using individual student interests on student problem-solving performance. Ten word problems were selected randomly from a mathematics textbook to create a series of two assessments. Both assessments contained problems exactly as they appeared in the textbook and…