In 2005, to address concerns about students who might fall in the "gap" between the regular assessment and the alternate assessment based on alternate achievement standards (AA-AAS), the U.S. Department of Education announced that states could develop alternate assessments based on modified achievement standards (AA-MAS). This article…

Recent reform efforts in undergraduate biology have recommended transforming course exams to test at more cognitively challenging levels, which may mean including more cognitively challenging and more constructed-response questions on assessments. However, changing the characteristics of exams could result in bias against historically underserved…

The "TOEFL"® family of assessments includes the "TOEFL"® Primary"™, "TOEFL Junior"®, and "TOEFL iBT"® tests. The linguistic complexity of stimulus passages in the reading sections of the TOEFL family of assessments is expected to differ across the test levels. This study evaluates the linguistic…

Modeling multidimensional test data with a unidimensional model can result in serious statistical errors, such as bias in item parameter estimates. Many methods exist for assessing the dimensionality of a test. The current study focused on DIMTEST. Using simulated data, the effects of sample size splitting for use with the ATFIND procedure for…

Three experiments demonstrated learners' abilities to adaptively and qualitatively accommodate their encoding strategies to the demands of an upcoming test. Stimuli were word pairs. In Experiment 1, test expectancy was induced for either cued recall (of targets given cues) or free recall (of targets only) across 4 study-test cycles of the same…

The rise in the affordability of quality video production equipment has resulted in increased interest in video-mediated tests of foreign language listening comprehension. Although research on such tests has continued fairly steadily since the early 1980s, studies have relied on analyses of raw scores, despite the growing prevalence of item…

The major purpose of this study is to examine the quality of ratings assigned to CR (constructed-response) questions in large-scale assessments from the perspective of Rasch Measurement Theory. Rasch Measurement Theory provides a framework for the examination of rating scale category structure that can yield useful information for interpreting the…

In view of the perceived difficulty of organic chemistry unit for high schools students, this study examined the usefulness of concept mapping as a testing device to assess students' difficulty in the select areas. Since many tests used for identifying students misconceptions and difficulties in school subjects are observed to favour one or the…

Since 1973, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has gathered information about student achievement in mathematics. Results of these periodic assessments, produced in print and web-based formats, provide valuable information to a wide variety of audiences. They inform citizens about the nature of students' comprehension of the…

This research examines whether the ordering of the difficulty of exams can influence student beliefs about their academic abilities and the impact of these beliefs on their performance. The ordering of the difficulty of test items has shown to affect performance. Study One (n = 91) examined college student differences in reaction to a difficult…

Language testing means taking decisions: about the test taker's results, but also about the test construct and the measures taken in order to ensure quality. This article takes the German test "telc Deutsch C1 Hochschule" as an example to illustrate this decision-making process in an academic context. The test is used for university…

Teachers' professional knowledge is assumed to be a key variable for effective teaching. As teacher education has the goal to enhance professional knowledge of current and future teachers, this knowledge should be described and assessed. Nevertheless, only a limited number of studies quantitatively measures physics teachers' professional…

Metacognition refers to students' knowledge and regulation of cognition, as well as their accuracy in predicting their academic performance. This study addressed two major questions: 1) how do metacognitive knowledge, regulation and accuracy differ across domains?, and 2) how do students' individual differences relate to their reported…

This paper describes one of the first efforts by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to improve measurement at the lower end of the distribution, including measurement for students with disabilities (SD) and English language learners (ELLs). One way to improve measurement at the lower end is to introduce one or more…

In aptitude and achievement tests, different response formats are usually used. A fundamental distinction must be made between the class of multiple-choice formats and the constructed response formats. Previous studies have examined the impact of different response formats applying traditional statistical approaches, but these influences can also…