While research into the role of semantic structure in the recognition of written and spoken words has grown, it has not looked specifically at the role of conversational context on the recognition of isolated words. This study was a corpus-based and behavioral exploration of a new semantic variable--sociality--and used on-line behavioral testing…

While there is consensus that institutions need to represent their educational effectiveness through documentation of student learning, the higher education community is divided between those who support national standardized tests to compare institutions' educational effectiveness, and those who believe that valid assessment of student…

Purpose: This study was aimed at determining the role of prosody and situational context in children's understanding of expressive utterances. Which one of these 2 cues will help children grasp the speaker's intention? Do children exhibit a "contextual bias" whereby they ignore prosody, such as the "lexical bias" found in other studies (M. Friend…

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the effect of the intensity of emotion expression on children's developing ability to label emotion during a dynamic presentation of five facial expressions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness). A computerized task (AFFECT--animated full facial expression comprehension test) was used to…

This research combines the idea of cake format dynamic assessment defined by Sternberg and Grigorenko (2001) and the "graduated prompt approach" proposed by (Campione and Brown, 1985) and (Campione and Brown, 1987) to develop a multiple-choice Web-based dynamic assessment system. This research adopts a quasi-experimental design to…

This paper reports on data collected via an audience response system, where a convenience sample of 300 adults aged 17-50 pressed a button to register their answers for twenty multiple choice questions. The responses were then discussed with the respondents at the time. The original dataset includes physics, biology and chemistry questions. The…

An interesting research question in light of recent technological developments is an investigation of the relationship between the time remaining to complete online quizzes and quiz scores. The data consist of over 4,000 individual quiz scores for six sections of Financial Management at The University of North Florida taught between the Summer of…

This study was conducted to identify and analyze some significant features that influence students and teachers about computer-based tests (CBT) and paper-and-pencil tests (P&P) at the context of the PAULEX Project. In order to do that, a large experiment has been developed at the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia (Polytechnic University of…

Much recent psychometric literature has focused on cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs), a promising class of instruments used to measure the strengths and weaknesses of examinees. This article introduces a genetic algorithm to perform automated test assembly alongside CDMs. The algorithm is flexible in that it can be applied whether the goal is to…

This article describes the process of design and implementation of GALACTICA ("Greek And Latin Accidence Consolidation Training, Internet-Centred Assessment") in support of the University of Oxford's Classics Faculty language consolidation classes. The context and aims of the previous paper-based "assessment" system are…

The author reported on the effectiveness of online quizzes in introductory finance courses. He found completion of quizzes near the time when the teacher presents the material in class lectures to be associated with a moderate and statistically significant increase in performance on exams. Feedback to students on their quiz performance did not…

Computerized adaptive testing (CAT) is described and compared with conventional tests, and its advantages summarized. Some item response theory concepts used in CAT are summarized and illustrated. The author describes the potential usefulness of CAT in counseling and education and reviews some current issues in the implementation of CAT.

Presented at the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) in Kansas City in June 2007. This presentation explores what has been learned in the effort to maintain the ability to collect demographic information on SAT test takers when registration moved to the web. The information which is collected for research purposes include student's…

Computer administered tests are becoming increasingly prevalent as computer technology becomes more readily available on a large scale. For testing programs that utilize both computer and paper administrations, mode effects are problematic in that they can result in examinee scores that are artificially inflated or deflated. As such, researchers…

Since researchers acknowledged the several advantages of computerized adaptive testing (CAT) over traditional linear test administration, the issue of item exposure control has received increased attention. Due to CAT's underlying philosophy, particular items in the item pool may be presented too often and become overexposed, while other items are…