This research addresses the change in how the Spanish University Entrance Examination can be delivered in the future. There is a wide acknowledgement that computer tests are very demanding for the delivering institutions which makes computer language testing difficult to implement. However, the use of tablet PCs can facilitate the delivery at even…

Every year, California's community colleges identify hundreds of thousands of students as not ready for transfer-level courses in math and English. Since these courses are required to transfer to a four-year college, students deemed underprepared are placed in developmental (also known as remedial or basic-skills) courses to prepare for college…

Prerequisite skill structures have been closely studied in past years leading to many data-intensive methods aimed at refining such structures. While many of these proposed methods have yielded success, defining and refining hierarchies of skill relationships are often difficult tasks. The relationship between skills in a graph could either be…

This study uses the feature sets employed by two automated scoring engines to determine if a "linguistic profile" could be formulated that would help identify items that are likely to exhibit differential item functioning (DIF) based on linguistic features. Sixteen items were administered to 1200 students where demographic information…

Thanks to the increased accessibility of multimedia technology, video texts have been widely used in teaching English in Chinese foreign language classrooms. This trend provides great impetus for changes in the means of assessing listening in both achievement and proficiency tests, and suggests the potential possibility of supplanting the…

Pragmatic competence is among the explicitly acknowledged sub-competences that make the communicative competence in any language (Bachman & Palmer, 1996; Council of Europe, 2001). Within the notion of pragmatic competence itself, "implicature (implied meanings)" comes to the fore as one of the five main areas there (Levinson, 1983).…

The Monte Carlo approach which has previously been implemented in traditional computerized adaptive testing (CAT) is applied here to cognitive diagnostic CAT to test the ability of this approach to address multiple content constraints. The performance of the Monte Carlo approach is compared with the performance of the modified maximum global…

Interest in developing computerized adaptive testing (CAT) under cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) has increased recently. CAT algorithms that use a fixed-length termination rule frequently lead to different degrees of measurement precision for different examinees. Fixed precision, in which the examinees receive the same degree of measurement…

Complex Problem Solving (CPS) skills are essential to successfully deal with environments that change dynamically and involve a large number of interconnected and partially unknown causal influences. The increasing importance of such skills in the 21st century requires appropriate assessment and intervention methods, which in turn rely on adequate…

This article reports on an experiment that examined the comprehension of transitive sentences in Czech children and its relationship to case marking, word order and information structure. A total of 107 Czech children aged 2;9-4;5 were tested for comprehension of noun-verb-noun sentences in which word order and given-new status of individual nouns…

The effects of study abroad on students' language proficiency have been analyzed using a number of measures such as surveys, questionnaires and oral proficiency exams (Collentine, 2004; Freed, 1995; Segalowitz, & Freed, 2004). Furthermore, researchers have sought to determine the proficiency gains of study abroad (SA) students by comparing…

The role of time on task (TOT) for students' attainment in a low-stakes assessment of cross-curricular skills was examined using the log data collected in the computer-based assessment (CBA). Two structural equation models were compared: Model 1, in which students' test scores were explained by grade point average (GPA) together with mastery and…

The scoring of constructed responses may introduce construct-irrelevant factors to a test score and affect its validity and fairness. Fatigue is one of the factors that could negatively affect human performance in general, yet little is known about its effects on a human rater's scoring quality on constructed responses. In this study, we compared…

In this study, the probability unit ability levels of the eleventh grade Turkish students were classified through cluster analysis. The study was carried out in a high school located in Trabzon, Turkey during the fall semester of the 2011-2012 academic years. A total of 84 eleventh grade students participated. Students were taught about…

This study investigated the impact of electronic-based dynamic assessment on the listening skill of Iranian EFL learners to achieve this goal, a group of 40 female EFL upper-intermediate students (aged between 26 to 38 years old) from to language institutes were selected as the participants of the study after administering a Quick Placement Test…