Open-ended questions in mathematics are commonly used by teachers to monitor and assess students' deeper conceptual understanding of content. Student answers to these types of questions often exhibit a combination of language, drawn diagrams and tables, and mathematical formulas and expressions that supply teachers with insight into the processes…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has considerable potential to model aspects of classroom discourse with the goals of automated assessment, feedback, and instructional support. However, modeling student talk is besieged by numerous challenges including a lack of data for child speech, low signal to noise ratio, speech disfluencies, and…

An online peer-assessment system typically allows students to give textual feedback to their peers, with the goal of helping the peers improve their work. The amount of help that students receive is highly dependent on the quality of the reviews. Previous studies have investigated using machine learning to detect characteristics of reviews (e.g.,…

Once a novelty, Digitally-Based Assessments (DBA) have become commonplace in the USA. With mathematics, it is often a necessity to include items that require the student to input a mathematical formula, equation, or expression. Many of these responses, especially in the upper grades, cannot be input with a standard keyboard, but must use some type…

The purpose of this study was to compare traditional oral reading fluency (ORF) measures to a computerized oral reading evaluation (CORE) system that uses speech recognition software. We applied a mixed model approach with two within-subject variables to test the mean WCPM score differences and the error rates between: passage length (25, 50, 85,…

The current study examined relationships between expert human judgments of text quality and grammar and mechanical errors in student writing. A corpus of essays (N = 100) written by high school students in the W-Pal system was collected, coded for grammar and mechanical errors, and scored by expert human raters. Results revealed weak relations…

In this project we developed web services on the ICALL platform Lärka for automatic generation of Swedish spelling exercises using Text-To-Speech (TTS) technology which allows L2 learners to train their spelling and listening individually at home. The spelling exercises contain five different linguistic levels, whereby the language learner has the…

Saudi college students majoring in translation take 6 interpreting courses. In those courses, they practice listening to and interpreting authentic lectures in a variety of subject areas. Results of an interpreting pretest showed that college students majoring in an interpreting course have problems with media reports. They have difficulty…

The Sato Caution Index takes into account the number and difficulty of items gotten wrong by a student within his or her ability, as well as the number and difficulty of items gotten right beyond his or her ability. Sato subtracts the two components to define a single Caution Index. In this study, the components are kept separate, defining a…

The main purpose of this study was to illustrate a polytomous IRT-based linking procedure that adjusts for rater variations. Test scores from two administrations of a statewide reading assessment were used. An anchor set of Year 1 students' constructed responses were rescored by Year 2 raters. To adjust for year-to-year rater variation in IRT…

Due to a concern regarding the validity of Chicago public elementary schools standardized test scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, a test audit was conducted. The audit was limited to 40 schools. Two schools were selected from each of the 20 administrative districts, with each school testing one seventh- and one eighth-grade class. These…

Previous studies of test item bias have investigated how different groups of examinees perform differently on a given set of items. These studies imply that examinees should be treated in a certain way because they are of a particular sex or race rather than as individuals in their own right, but it is unrealistic and unfair to assume such an…