It has been widely recognized that a visual impairment can limit an individual's ability to learn through visual observations. This decreased limited visual access which could impact how the skills to access and recognize the world around them develop. However, when the visual impairment was brain-based, such as in Cortical/Cerebral Visual…

This convergent, parallel, mixed-methods study with qualitative and quantitative content analysis methods was conducted to identify what type of thinking is required by the College and Career Readiness Assessment (CCRA+) by (a) determining the frequency and percentage of questions categorized as higher-level thinking within each cell of Hess'…

This research examined the Chinese National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) in mathematics before and after the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, specifically covering the periods 1952-1965 and 1977-1984. The central focus was on the organization, structure, and content of the examinations, as well as their influence on and interaction…

The following is a five-chapter dissertation surrounding the use of text mining techniques for better understanding the language of mathematics items from standardized tests to improve linguistic equity of these items to support assessment of English Language Learners. Introduction: The dissertation begins with an overview of the problem that…

According to the RAND model framework, reading comprehension test performance is influenced by readers' reading skills or reader characteristics, test properties, and their interactions. However, little empirical research has systematically compared the impacts of reader characteristics, test properties, and reader-test interactions across…

Item response theory (IRT) uses a family of statistical models for estimating stable characteristics of items and examinees and defining how these characteristics interact in describing item and test performance. With a focus on the three-parameter logistic IRT (Birnbaum, 1968; Lord, 1980) model, the current study examines the accuracy and…

This study examined the relationship between high school exit exams and mathematical proficiency. With the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act requiring all students to be proficient in mathematics by 2014, it is imperative that high-stakes assessments accurately evaluate all aspects of student achievement, appropriately set the yardstick by which…

Small sample equating remains a largely unexplored area of research. This study attempts to fill in some of the research gaps via a large-scale, IRT-based simulation study that evaluates the performance of seven small-sample equating methods under various test characteristic and sampling conditions. The equating methods considered are typically…