Background and Context: Valid assessment of understanding of programming concepts in primary school children is essential to implement and improve programming education. Objective: We developed and validated the Computerized Adaptive Programming Concepts Test (CAPCT) with a novel application of Item Response Theory. The CAPCT is a web-based and…

Log files from computer-based assessment can help better understand respondents' behaviours and cognitive strategies. Analysis of timing information from Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) reveals large differences in the time participants take to answer assessment items, as well as large country differences…

Modern digital technologies enable the efficient collection and processing of student perceptions of teaching quality. However, students' ratings could be confounded by student, teacher, and classroom characteristics. We investigated students' ratings of 26 teachers who used the digital tool Impact! in their mathematics lessons with 14- and…

Research on automated affect detection in educational software using play log data has shown promising results. Yet most studies use classroom-based software designed for adolescents or adults. In this paper, we aim to detect affection in an online educational platform primarily aimed at home use by young children. This presents two challenges: we…

Two experiments tracked the encoding of relational information (actions at the level of the prelinguistic message and verbs at the level of the sentence) during formulation of transitive event descriptions (e.g., The tiger is scratching the photographer). At what point during message and sentence formulation do speakers encode actions and verbs?…

This study contrasted the effects of tutoring, multiple try and no feedback on children's progression in analogy solving and examined individual differences herein. Feedback that includes additional hints or explanations leads to the greatest learning gains in adults. However, children process feedback differently from adults and effective…

Over the last two decades, the educational use of digital devices, including digital assessments, has become a regular feature of teaching in primary education in the Netherlands. However, researchers have not reached a consensus about the so-called "mode effect," which refers to the possible impact of using computer-based tests (CBT)…

Approximately a third of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) items in the core domains (math, reading, and science) are constructed-response items and require human coding (scoring). This process is time-consuming, expensive, and prone to error as often (a) humans code inconsistently, and (b) coding reliability in…

A popular method to assess measurement invariance of a particular item is based on likelihood ratio tests with all other items as anchor items. The results of this method are often only reported in terms of statistical significance, and researchers proposed different methods to empirically select anchor items. It is unclear, however, how many…

The Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression (CES-D) scale is a well-known self-report instrument that is used to measure depressive symptomatology. Respondents who take the full-length version of the CES-D are administered a total of 20 items. This article investigates the use of curtailment and stochastic curtailment (SC), two sequential…

The effects of written feedback in a computer-based assessment for learning on students' learning outcomes were investigated in an experiment at a Higher Education institute in the Netherlands. Students were randomly assigned to three groups, and were subjected to an assessment for learning with different kinds of feedback. These are immediate…

This article extends the work by Armstrong and Shi on CUmulative SUM (CUSUM) person-fit methodology. The authors present new theoretical considerations concerning the use of CUSUM person-fit statistics based on likelihood ratios for the purpose of detecting cheating and random guessing by individual test takers. According to the Neyman-Pearson…

Overexposure and underexposure of items in the bank are serious problems in operational computerized adaptive testing (CAT) systems. These exposure problems might result in item compromise, or point at a waste of investments. The exposure control problem can be viewed as a test assembly problem with multiple objectives. Information in the test has…

It is generally assumed that emotion facilitates human vision in order to promote adaptive responses to a potential threat in the environment. Surprisingly, we recently found that emotion in some cases impairs the perception of elementary visual features (Bocanegra & Zeelenberg, 2009b). Here, we demonstrate that emotion improves fast temporal…

Traditional data mining techniques have been extensively applied to find interesting patterns, build descriptive and predictive models from large volumes of data accumulated through the use of different information systems. The results of data mining can be used for getting a better understanding of the underlying educational processes, for…