The New Mexico Public Education Department developed the Kindergarten Observation Tool (KOT) as a multidimensional observational measure of students' knowledge and skills at kindergarten entry. The primary purpose of the KOT is to inform instruction, so that kindergarten teachers can use the information about their students' knowledge and skills…

Even though there is an increasing interest in response styles, the field lacks a systematic investigation of the bias that response styles potentially cause. Therefore, a simulation was carried out to study this phenomenon with a focus on applied settings (reliability, validity, scale scores). The influence of acquiescence and extreme response…

The theoretical reason for the presence of differential item functioning (DIF) is that data are multidimensional and two groups of examinees differ in their underlying ability distribution for the secondary dimension(s). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine how much the secondary ability distributions must differ before DIF is…

Making inferences and reasoning with new scientific information is critical for successful performance in biology coursework. Thus, identifying students who are weak in these skills could allow the early provision of additional support and course placement recommendations to help students develop their reasoning abilities, leading to better…

Purpose: The answer-copying tendency has the potential to detect suspicious answer patterns for prior distributions of statistical detection techniques. The aim of this study is to develop a valid and reliable measurement tool as a scale in order to observe the tendency of university students' copying of answers. Also, it is aimed to provide…

Situational Judgement Questions (SJQs) measuring process quality were included in the OECD Starting Strong Teaching and Learning International Survey 2018 (TALIS Starting Strong 2018) to address concerns of self-report bias in large-scale international surveys. These SJQs provide the staff in early childhood education and care with situations…

School districts and states across the Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic Region and the country as a whole have been modifying their teacher evaluation systems to identify more effective and less effective teachers and provide better feedback to improve instructional practice. The new systems typically include components related to…

Proficiency with written communication (WC) is critical for success in college and careers. As a result, institutions face a growing challenge to accurately evaluate their students' writing skills to obtain data that can support demands of accreditation, accountability, or curricular improvement. Many current standardized measures, however, lack…

Chinese higher education is experiencing rapid development and growth. With tremendous resources invested in higher education, policy makers have requested more direct evidence of student learning. However, assessment tools that can be used to measure college-level learning are scarce in China. To mitigate this situation, we translated the…

The "HOPE Scale" was developed to identify academic and social components of giftedness and talent in elementary-aged students with particular attention to students from low-income and/or culturally diverse families. Based on previous findings, additional research was conducted on revisions made to the "HOPE Scale". Items were…

Scientific argumentation is one of the core practices for teachers to implement in science classrooms. We developed a computer-based formative assessment to support students' construction and revision of scientific arguments. The assessment is built upon automated scoring of students' arguments and provides feedback to students and teachers.…

Students' opinions continue to be a significant factor in the evaluation of teaching in higher education institutions. The purpose of this study was to psychometrically assess short students evaluation of teaching (SET) forms using the UAE University form as a model. The study evaluated the form validity, reliability, the overall question, and…

This study was designed to provide multiple sources of evidence of the validity of the Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ) and to clarify the hierarchy of creative achievement using Rasch analyses. A total of 905 Taiwanese participants (345 men and 558 women) completed the CAQ online. The Rasch model was used to assess model-data fit. A…

Validity of educational research instruments and student assessments has appropriately become a growing interest in the chemistry education research community. Of particular concern is an attention to the consequences to students that result from the interpretation of assessment scores and whether those consequences are swayed by invalidity within…

Many psychological scales written in the Likert format include reverse worded (RW) items in order to control acquiescence bias. However, studies have shown that RW items often contaminate the factor structure of the scale by creating one or more method factors. The present study examines an alternative scale format, called the Expanded format,…