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…

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,…

Differences between the academic (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) and government (Foreign Service Institute) versions of the oral proficiency interview test are examined, and data from two studies of interrater reliability are presented and discussed. (MSE)

This proof-of-concept investigation describes a computer-based approach for deriving the knowledge structure of individuals and of groups from their written essays, and considers the convergent criterion-related validity of the computer-based scores relative to human rater essay scores and multiple-choice test scores. After completing a…

In the Dutch national examinations, reading comprehension tests are used for all languages. For the native language, reading comprehension is tested with reading passages and related questions to which the test-taker provides his own response, not choosing from a group of alternatives. One problem encountered in testing with these items is…