Pre- and postcourse assessment has become a very important tool for education research in physics and other areas. The web offers an attractive alternative to in-class paper administration, but concerns about web-based administration include reliability due to changes in medium, student compliance rates, and test security, both question leakage…

The placement and diagnostic tests used in instructional systems designed to be adaptive to the individual learner's characteristics are examined. The necessity of pretesting students before instruction is questioned. According to the author, both the necessity for and the content of the Individually Prescribed Instruction (IPI) type of pretest…

During a three-year project (1977-1980) on computerized adaptive achievement testing, item characteristic curve theory (ICC) and adaptive testing strategies designed almost exclusively for ability testing were applied to achievement testing. Adaptive techniques substantially reduced test length without reducing quality, when applied to three…

This paper describes a study of the computer essay-scoring program BETSY. While the use of computers in rating written scripts has been criticised in some quarters for lacking transparency or lack of fit with how human raters rate written scripts, a number of essay rating programs are available commercially, many of which claim to offer comparable…

Introductory gerontology courses have the potential to enhance student appreciation of aging issues. The effectiveness of such courses for informing views about individual aging is little studied. This study, using a quasi-experimental design, examines the impact of participation in an introductory course in aging on 158 undergraduate students in…

This study compared the impact of proctoring on the final course grades of community college students enrolled in distance education mathematics courses. The goal was to determine whether distance education students who are evaluated entirely online, in environments that are not proctored, receive grades that differ from distance education…

The uptake of CAA in UK higher education (HE) on a large scale lags behind the expectations of CAA specialists. A research project was undertaken with the aim of discovering and addressing the underlying reasons for this. The research was conducted according to Strauss and Corbin's (1998) prescription for grounded theory (GT) research. During…

In current psychological research, the analysis of data from computer-based assessments or experiments is often confined to accuracy scores. Response times, although being an important source of additional information, are either neglected or analyzed separately. In this article, a new model is developed that allows the simultaneous analysis of…

Formulating-Hypotheses (F-H) items present a situation and ask the examinee to generate as many explanations for it as possible. This study examined the generalizability, validity, and examinee perceptions of a computer-delivered version of the task. Eight F-H questions were administered to 192 graduate students. Half of the items restricted…

Three new computer-administered item types for the analytical scale of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) General Test were developed and evaluated. One item type was a free-response version of the current analytical reasoning item type. The second item type was a somewhat constrained free-response version of the pattern identification (or…

The objective of this study was to assess the degree to which the mode of administration of the computer-based Academic Skills Assessments of the "Praxis Series: Professional Assessments for Beginning Teachers" contributes to performance differences among test takers. Inexperienced or anxious computer users (Praxis pilot sample of 446…

The construction of parallel editions of conventional tests for purposes of test security while maintaining score comparability has always been a recognized and difficult problem in psychometrics and test construction. The introduction of new modes of test construction, e.g., adaptive testing, changes the nature of the problem, but does not make…

A 1992 study by R. Gershon found discrepancies when comparing the theoretical Rasch item characteristic curve with the average empirical curve for 1,304 vocabulary items administered to 7,711 students. When person-item mismatches were deleted (for any person-item interaction where the ability of the person was much higher or much lower than the…

The results of a small research project that studied the effect computer administration has on student performance for writing or essay tests are presented. The introduction of computer-administered tests has raised concern about the equivalence of scores generated by computer versus paper-and-pencil test versions. For this study a sample of…

The degree to which laptop and standard-size desktop computers are likely to produce comparable test results for the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) General Test was studied. Verbal, quantitative, and writing sections of a retired version of the GRE were used, since it was expected that performance on reading passages or mathematics items might…