Different types of test items influence students' test anxiety, and physiological measures such as heart rate provide a means of measuring this anxiety. This study aimed to explore the connection between test anxiety and examination item formats. It centered on 20 junior university students in Western Türkiye. The research monitored students'…

Recent advances in automated scoring technology have made it practical to replace multiple-choice questions (MCQs) with short-answer questions (SAQs) in large-scale, high-stakes assessments. However, most previous research comparing these formats has used small examinee samples testing under low-stakes conditions. Additionally, previous studies…

We describe and evaluate a method to mitigate unwanted student collaborations in assessments, which we recently implemented in a second-year undergraduate mathematics module. The method requires a list of specific pairs of students to be prevented from collaborating, which we constructed based on the results of previous assessments. We converted…

Unproctored and teacher-proctored exams have been widely used to prevent cheating at many universities worldwide. However, no empirical studies have directly compared their effectiveness in promoting academic integrity in actual exams. To address this significant gap, in four preregistered field studies, we examined the effectiveness of…

Multiple-choice questions have become ubiquitous in educational measurement because the format allows for efficient and accurate scoring. Nonetheless, there remains continued interest in constructed-response formats. This interest has driven efforts to develop computer-based scoring procedures that can accurately and efficiently score these items.…

This research study explored the systematic thinking modes underlying test anxiety in 706 engineering students through an experiment centred on the cognitive algebra paradigm. The participants had to read 36 experimental scenarios that narrated an imaginary academic assessment situation one by one and then judge the level of anxiety they…

When administering an in-class exam, a common decision that confronts every instructor is whether the exam format should be closed book or open book. The present review synthesizes research examining the effect of administering closed-book or open-book assessments on long-term learning. Although the overall effect of assessment format on learning…

This article compares two methods for detecting local item dependence (LID): residual correlation examination and Rasch testlet modeling (RTM), in a commonly used 3:6 matching format and an extended matching test (EMT) format. The two formats are hypothesized to facilitate different levels of item dependency due to differences in the number of…

Purpose: While known by many names, qualifying exams function as gatekeepers to graduate student advancement to PhD candidacy, yet there has been little formal study on best qualifying exam practices particularly in biomedical and related STEM PhD programs. The purpose of this study is to examine the current state of qualifying exams through an…

Driven by technological innovations, continuous digital expansion has transformed fundamentally the landscape of modern higher education, leading to discussions about evaluation techniques. The emergence of generative artificial intelligence raises questions about reliability and academic honesty regarding multiple-choice assessments in online…

Two-stage testing is a form of collaborative assessment that creates an active learning environment during test taking. In two-stage testing, students first complete an exam individually, and then complete a subset of the same questions as part of a learning team with the ultimate exam score being a weighted average of the individual and team…

Using multiple versions of an assessment has the potential to introduce item environment effects. These types of effects result in version dependent item characteristics (i.e., difficulty and discrimination). Methods to detect such effects and resulting implications are important for all levels of assessment where multiple forms of an assessment…

Research shows that there are multiple benefits to giving college students oral rather than written exams. However, studies that examine, describe, and differentiate how students view their oral exams were never found in a literature search. The purpose of this study was to use Q methodology [Q] to describe the divergent student views about taking…

The testing effect refers to the gains in learning and retention that result from taking practice tests before the final test. Understanding the conditions under which practice tests improve learning is crucial, so four experiments were conducted with a total of 438 undergraduate students in Turkey. In the first study, students who took graded…

The purpose of this study was to examine any differences in test scores between three different online versions of the Mental Cutting Test (MCT). The MCT was developed to quantify a rotational and proportion construct of spatial ability and has been used extensively to assess spatial ability. This test was developed in 1938 as a paper-and-pencil…