We investigated the relationship between the scores assigned by an Automated Essay Scoring (AES) system, the Intelligent Essay Assessor (IEA), and grades allocated by trained, professional human raters to English essay writing by instigating two procedures novel to written-language assessment: the logistic transformation of AES raw scores into…

In this study we seek evidence of validity according to the socio-cognitive framework (Weir, 2005) for a new sentence repetition test (SRT) for young Deaf L1 Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS) users. SRTs have been developed for various purposes for both spoken and sign languages to assess language development in children. In order to address the…

This study explored the interplay between content knowledge and reading ability in a large-scale multistage adaptive English for academic purposes (EAP) reading assessment at a range of ability levels across 1-12 graders. The datasets for this study were item-level responses to the reading tests of ACCESS for ELLs Online 2.0. A sample of 10,000…

Stakeholders of language tests are often interested in subscores. However, reporting a subscore is not always justified; a subscore should provide reliable and distinct information to be worth reporting. When a subscore is used for decisions across multiple levels (e.g., individual test takers and schools), it needs to be justified for its…

K-12 English language proficiency tests that assess multiple content domains (e.g., listening, speaking, reading, writing) often have subsections based on these content domains; scores assigned to these subsections are commonly known as subscores. Testing programs face increasing customer demands for the reporting of subscores in addition to the…

We investigated how young language learners process their responses on and perceive a computer-mediated, timed speaking test. Twenty 8-, 9-, and 10-year-old non-native English-speaking children (NNSs) and eight same-aged, native English-speaking children (NSs) completed seven computerized sample TOEFL® Primary™ speaking test tasks. We investigated…

This paper reports a post-hoc analysis of the influence of lexical difficulty of cue sentences on performance in an elicited imitation (EI) task to assess oral production skills for 645 child L2 English learners in instructional settings. This formed part of a large-scale investigation into effectiveness of foreign language teaching in Polish…

One critical issue with cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) lies in its lack of research evidence that shows how diagnostic feedback from CDA is interpreted and used by young students. This mixed methods research examined how holistic diagnostic feedback (HDF) is processed by young learners with different profiles of reading skills, goal…

This study investigated the validity of four theoretically motivated traits of writing ability across English and Korean, based on elementary school students' responses to letter- and story-writing tasks. Their responses were scored analytically and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis. The findings include the following. A model of writing…