The present study investigates the impact of participation in a peer assessment activity on subsequent academic performance. Students in two sections of an introductory psychology course completed a practice quiz 1 week prior to each of three course exams. Students in the experimental group participated in a five-step double-blind peer assessment…

We assessed the performance of students with a self-reported conflict between their religious belief and the theory of evolution in two sections of a large introductory biology course (N = 373 students). Student performance was measured through pretest and posttest evolution essays and multiple- choice (MC) questions (evolution-related and…

There have been calls in the literature for changes to assessment practices in higher education, to increase flexibility and give learners more control over the assessment process. This article explores the possibilities of allowing student choice in the format used to present their work, as a starting point for changing assessment, based on…

Undergraduate biology education is often viewed as being focused on memorization rather than development of students' critical-thinking abilities. We speculated that open-note testing would be an easily implemented change that would emphasize higher-order thinking. As open-note testing is not commonly used in the biological sciences and the…

Multiple-choice formats remain a popular design for assessing listening comprehension, yet no consensus has been reached on how multiple-choice formats should be employed. Some researchers argue that test takers must be provided with a preview of the items prior to the input (Buck, 1995; Sherman, 1997); others argue that a preview may decrease the…

The rise in the affordability of quality video production equipment has resulted in increased interest in video-mediated tests of foreign language listening comprehension. Although research on such tests has continued fairly steadily since the early 1980s, studies have relied on analyses of raw scores, despite the growing prevalence of item…

The use of integrated skills tasks in language tests has been debated for many years and international English test developers such as Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Pearson Tests of English (PTE) already use such tests to assess English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' language proficiency. Empirical research has rarely investigated…

Although end of course exams remain a key mode of assessment in higher education, little research has focused on international students' experiences of exams. There seems to be a tacit assumption in most literature that exam preparation and strategies are universal, although differences in other areas of learning exist. As an exemplar, this…

This research examines whether the ordering of the difficulty of exams can influence student beliefs about their academic abilities and the impact of these beliefs on their performance. The ordering of the difficulty of test items has shown to affect performance. Study One (n = 91) examined college student differences in reaction to a difficult…

This study analyzed effective test formats that utilized tablets for tests in university information basic subjects in blended learning environments. Specifically, three types of test were created: (1) multiple-choice, (2) fill-in-the-blank, and (3) a mixture of multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank. An analysis focusing on university students'…

Multiple-choice (MC) tests are frequently used to measure language competence because they are quick, economical and straightforward to score. While degrees of correctness have been investigated for partially correct responses in combined-response MC tests, degrees of incorrectness in distractors and the role they play in determining the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of constructivism on assessment approach, where the type of question (true or false, multiple-choice, calculation or essay) is used productively. Although the student's approach to learning and the teacher's approach to teaching are concepts that have been widely researched, few…

An important gap in the field of second language vocabulary assessment concerns the lack of validated tests measuring aural vocabulary knowledge. The primary purpose of this study is to introduce and provide preliminary validity evidence for the Listening Vocabulary Levels Test (LVLT), which has been designed as a diagnostic tool to measure…

Partial dictation is a measure of EFL listening proficiency that can be easily constructed, administered, and scored by EFL teachers. However, it is controversial whether this form of test measures lower-order abilities exclusively or involves both lower- and higher-order abilities. In order to answer this question, a study was designed to examine…

Language testing means taking decisions: about the test taker's results, but also about the test construct and the measures taken in order to ensure quality. This article takes the German test "telc Deutsch C1 Hochschule" as an example to illustrate this decision-making process in an academic context. The test is used for university…