Many university programs include Microsoft Excel courses given their value as a scientific and technical tool. However, evaluating what is effectively learned by students is a challenging task. Considering multiple-choice written exams are a standard evaluation format, this study aimed to uncover the features influencing students' success in…

ACT requested assistance from the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment (Center for Assessment) to investigate declines of scores for states administering the ACT to its 11th grade students in 2018. This request emerged from conversations among state leaders, the Center for Assessment, and ACT in trying to understand the…

Standardized assessments are widely used to determine access to educational resources with important consequences for later economic outcomes in life. However, many design features of the tests themselves may lead to psychological reactions influencing performance. In particular, the level of difficulty of the earlier questions in a test may…

In this research, the effect of an item's type and cognitive level on its difficulty index was investigated. The data source of the study consisted of the responses of the 12535 students in the Turkey sample (6079 and 6456 students from eighth and fourth grade respectively) of TIMSS 2015. The responses were a total of 215 items at the eighth-grade…

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…

Standardized testing is ubiquitous in educational assessment, but questions have been raised about the extent to which these test scores accurately reflect students' genuine knowledge and skills. To more rigorously investigate this issue, the current study employed a within-subject experimental design to examine item format effects on primary…

The purpose of this study was to examine eighth-grade students' science performance in terms of two test design components, item format, and cognitive domain. The portion of Taiwanese data came from the 2011 administration of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), one of the major international large-scale assessments…

This classroom experiment investigates the effects of adding representational pictures to multiple-choice and constructed-response test items to understand the role of the response format for the multimedia effect in testing. Participants were 575 fifth- and sixth-graders who answered 28 science test items--seven items in each of four experimental…

Progress monitoring has been adopted as an integral part of multi-tiered support systems. Oral reading fluency (ORF) is the most established assessment for progress-monitoring purposes. To generate valid trend lines or slopes, ORF passages must be of equivalent difficulty. Recently, however, evidence indicates that ORF passages are not equivalent,…

Although multiple-choice items (MCIs) are widely used for classroom assessment, designing MCIs with sufficient number of plausible distracters is very challenging for teachers. In this regard, previous empirical studies reveal that using three-option MCIs provides various advantages when compared to four-option MCIs due to less preparation and…

This study investigated the performance of four widely used data-collection designs in detecting test-mode effects (i.e., computer-based versus paper-based testing). The experimental conditions included four data-collection designs, two test-administration modes, and the availability of an anchor assessment. The test-level and item-level results…

Since 1973, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has gathered information about student achievement in mathematics. The NAEP assessment in mathematics has two components that differ in purpose. One assessment measures long-term trends in achievement among 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students by using the same basic design each time.…

Progress monitoring of academic achievement is an essential element to prevent learning disorders. A prominent approach is curriculum-based measurement (CBM). Various studies have documented positive effects of CBM on students' achievement. Nevertheless, the use of CBM is associated with additional work for teachers. The use of tablets may be of…

Computer-based test (CBT) and paper-based test (PBT) are two test modes to the test takers that have been widely adopted in the field of language testing or assessment over the last few decades. Due to the rapid development of science and technology, it is a trend for universities and educational institutions striving rather hard to deliver the…

The history and evolution of science assessment remains poorly known, especially in the context of the exam question contents. Here we analyze the Finnish matriculation examination in biology from the 1920s to 1960s to understand how the exam has evolved in both its knowledge content and educational form. Each question was classified according to…