Reading comprehension has an important place in lifelong learning. It is an interactive process between the reader and the text. Students need reading comprehension skills at all educational levels and for all school subjects. Determining the level of students' reading comprehension skills is the subject of testing and evaluation. Tests used to…

For many years, question choice has been used in some UK public examinations, with students free to choose which questions they answer from a selection (within certain parameters). There has been little published research on choice of exam questions in recent years in the UK. In this article we distinguish different scenarios in which choice…

Higher-order thinking skills (HOTs) are very crucial thinking skills needed by teachers to train students to develop 21st-century learning. This study aimed to develop Multiple Choice and Essay Questions to measure the HOTs of the prospective teachers of the elementary school education department. This study used a 4-D model by Thiagarajan which…

Background: Of the myriad of reading comprehension (RC) assessments used in schools, multiple-choice (MC) questions continue to be one of the most prevalent formats used by educators and researchers. Outcomes from RC assessments dictate many critical factors encountered during a student's academic career, and it is crucial that we gain a deeper…

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…

Aim/Purpose: The aim of this study is to understand student's opinions and perceptions about e-assessment when the assessment process was changed from the traditional computer assisted method to a multiple-choice Moodle based method. Background: In order to implement continuous assessment to a large number of students, several shifts are…

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…

We study the automatic identification of educational items worthy of content authors' attention. Based on the results of such analysis, content authors can revise and improve the content of learning environments. We provide an overview of item properties relevant to this task, including difficulty and complexity measures, item discrimination, and…

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…

The purpose of this study is to determine the best IRT model [Rasch, 2PL, 3PL, 4PL and mixed IRT (2 and 3PL)] for the science and technology subtest of the Transition from Basic Education to Secondary Education (TEOG) exam, which is carried out at national level, it is also aimed to predict the item parameters under the best model. This study is a…

In multiple-choice tests, the quality of distractors may be more important than their number. We therefore examined the joint influence of distractor quality and quantity on test functioning by providing a sample of 5,793 participants with five parallel test sets consisting of items that differed in the number and quality of distractors.…

Students, as well as teachers, often learn what makes sense to them, even when it is wrong. These misconceptions are a problem. The authors sought a quick, quantitative way of identifying student misconceptions in secondary science. Using the University of Toronto's National Biology Competition test data, this article presents a method of quickly…

This study investigates the effects of adding stem preview to an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) multiple-choice listening assessment. In stem preview, listeners may view the item stems, but not response options, before listening. Previous research indicates that adding preview to an exam typically decreases difficulty, but raises concerns…

Published banks of multiple-choice questions are ubiquitous, the questions in those banks often being classified into levels of difficulty. The specific level of difficulty into which a question is classified might or should be a function of the question's substance. Possibly, though, insubstantive aspects of the question, such as the incidence of…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to examine the development of past tense counterfactual (PTCF) sentences ("If the dog had stayed in the house, he would not have bitten the police officer") in young adolescents and young adults, addressing both production and comprehension. The goal was to determine if growth occurs during…