Assuring the quality of education is a concern of learning institutions. To do so, it is necessary to have assertive learning management, with consistent data on students' outcomes. This research provides associate deans and researchers, a roadmap with which to gather evidence to improve the quality of open-ended assessments. Based on statistical…

As access to smartphones and emerging technologies has become ubiquitous in our daily lives and in language learning, technology-mediated social interaction has become common in teaching and assessing L2 speaking. The changing ecology of L2 spoken interaction provides language educators and testers with opportunities for renewed test design and…

The goal in personalized assessment is to best fit the needs of each individual test taker, given the assessment purposes. Design-In-Real-Time (DIRTy) assessment reflects the progressive evolution in testing from a single test, to an adaptive test, to an adaptive assessment "system." In this paper, we lay the foundation for DIRTy…

Drawing on Glenn Fulcher's extensive work in performance-based language assessment of speaking, this paper explores the assessment of L2 speaking ability in local language testing contexts. For that purpose, I review Fulcher's influential work that highlights the relationship between the speaking construct, the task, the performance, and the…

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…

A Vygotskian approach to assessment is proposed by invoking the distinction between the development of lower and higher psychological functions. Higher psychological functions are specifically human and develop with the use of cultural tools via mediation. Accordingly, a distinction is made between tests that are based on association, which have…

In this essay, I explore an exam format that pairs multiple-choice questions with required rationales. In a space adjacent to each multiple-choice question, students explain why or how they arrived at the answer they selected. This exercise builds the critical thinking skill known as metacognition, thinking about thinking, into an exam that also…

This article presents the analysis of evaluation methods used in a well-designed and comprehensive evaluation effort of a significant Extension program. The evaluation data collection methods were analyzed by questionnaire mode and timing of follow-up surveys. Response rates from the short- and long-term follow-ups and different questionnaire…

In the attempt to identify or prevent unfair tests, both quantitative analyses and logical evaluation are often used. For the most part, fairness evaluation is a pragmatic attempt at determining whether procedural or substantive due process has been accorded to either a group of test takers or an individual. In both the individual and comparative…

In this article we discuss how apparently indicators that may appear straightforward, such as gender differences, need to be interpreted with extreme care. In particular, we consider how the assessment framework, and the methodology of international surveys, may have a potential impact on the results and on the indicators. Through analysis of…

While research suggests that formative assessment can be a powerful tool to support teaching and learning, efforts to jump on the formative assessment bandwagon have been more widespread than those to assure the technical quality of the assessments. This report covers initial analyses of data bearing on the quality of formative assessments in…

This exploratory study was built on research spanning three decades. Petersen, Marco, and Stewart (1982) conducted a major empirical investigation of the efficacy of different equating methods. The studies reported in Dorans (1990) examined how different equating methods performed across samples selected in different ways. Recent population…

Students at the University of Edinburgh do almost all their work on computers, but at the end of the semester they are examined by handwritten essays. Intuitively it would be appealing to allow students the choice of handwriting or typing, but this raises a concern that perhaps this might not be "fair"--that the choice a student makes,…

In educational measurement, the construction of parallel test forms is often a combinatorial optimization problem that involves the time-consuming selection of items to construct tests having approximately the same test information functions (TIFs) and constraints. This article proposes a novel method, genetic algorithm (GA), to construct parallel…

This study aimed to provide evidence to guide decisions on the type and timing of assessments in a graduate medical programme, by identifying whether students from particular degree backgrounds face greater difficulty in satisfying the current assessment requirements. We examined the performance rank of students in three types of assessments and…