Testing within the science classroom is commonly used for both formative and summative assessment purposes to let the student and the instructor gauge progress toward learning goals. Research within cognitive science suggests, however, that testing can also be a learning event. We present summaries of studies that suggest that repeated retrieval…

Two different versions of "big ideas" rooted content maps have recently been published for general chemistry. As embodied in the content outline from the College Board, one of these maps is designed to guide curriculum development and testing for advanced placement (AP) chemistry. The Anchoring Concepts Content Map for general chemistry…

Test-item writing efforts typically results in item pools with an undesirable correlational structure between the content attributes of the items and their statistical information. If such pools are used in computerized adaptive testing (CAT), the algorithm may be forced to select items with less than optimal information, that violate the content…

This paper provides an historical perspective on the content of the SAT. The review begins at the beginning, when the first College Board SAT (the Scholastic Aptitude Test) was administered to 8,040 students on June 23, 1926. At that time, the SAT consisted of nine subtests: Definitions, Arithmetical Problems, Classification, Artificial Language,…