In order to ensure content validity by covering a broad range of content domains, the testing times of some educational large-scale assessments last up to a total of two hours or more. Performance decline over the course of taking the test has been extensively documented in the literature. It can occur due to increases in the numbers of: (a)…

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), US reading and math scores have recently dropped. This decline is believed to be the result of the school closings that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. The drop likely contributed to the increase in pressure educators are feeling to teach in a way that leads to higher test…

The Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE-A), a widely used high-stakes language proficiency test for university admissions and migration purposes, underwent a notable change from a three-hour to a two-hour version in November 2021. The implementation of the new version has prompted inquiries into the washback effects on various stakeholders.…

The teaching of English as a foreign language in Indonesia has a long history, and it is always important to ask whether the assessment of the students' language skills has been valid and reliable. A screening of many articles in several prominent databases reveal that a number of evaluation studies have been done by Indonesian scholars in the…

International large-scale assessments provide cross-national data on students' cognitive and non-cognitive characteristics. A critical methodological issue that often arises in comparing data from cross-national studies is ensuring measurement invariance, indicating that the construct under investigation is the same across the compared groups.…

Washback refers to the impact of a test on instruction and learning, with high-stakes tests exerting both positive and negative effects. This study examined the washback of an English exit exam (EEE) on English language learning at a Thai university where English-medium instruction is used in most academic disciplines. The EEE is an in-house…

The use of multistage adaptive testing (MST) has gradually increased in large-scale testing programs as MST achieves a balanced compromise between linear test design and item-level adaptive testing. MST works on the premise that each examinee gives their best effort when attempting the items, and their responses truly reflect what they know or can…

The Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) aims to assess Korean high school students' scholastic ability required for college readiness. As a high-stakes test, the examination serves as a pivotal hurdle for university admission and exerts a strong washback effect on the educational system in Korea. The present study set out to investigate…

This study employed a multi-methods design to investigate the impact of preparation on Chinese test-takers' perceptions of the integrated TOEFL iBT speaking and writing design. Combining results from over 1700 surveys and 10 interviews, it was found that these Chinese test-takers, who are the most vulnerable group in the multimillion testing…

The study investigated hurdles to the quality of student learning assessment by examining issues related to assessment procedures and practices, learners and learning, learning resources and test constructs, and test admin and feedback. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from two Ethiopian universities using two types of…

In international large-scale assessments, students may not be compelled to answer every test item: a student can decide to skip a seemingly difficult item or may drop out before the end of the test is reached. The way these missing responses are treated will affect the estimation of the item difficulty and student ability, and ultimately affect…

This paper employs a Critical Cultural Political Economy of Education perspective to examine how, why, and to what effect the English proficiency rankings of a for-profit edu-business acquire the authority often granted to international large-scale assessments. Analysing the EF English Proficiency Index in the context of Ecuador illustrates how…

This article provides a single, common-case study of a test retrofit project at one Colombian university. It reports on how the test retrofit project was carried out and describes the different areas of language assessment literacy the project afforded local teacher stakeholders. This project was successful in that it modified the test constructs…

Research on Portuguese language exams in the language assessment field remains scarce. To bridge this gap, this study examined washback from the large-scale, high-stakes Portuguese proficiency tests created by the Center of Evaluation of Portuguese as a Foreign Language ("Centro de Avaliação de Português Língua Estrangeira," or CAPLE as…

Since 2018, colleagues from two research centers at Dublin City University have been collaborating to develop a measurement scale to assess individuals' ability to identify workplace bullying. Having agreed on an operational definition of the construct, an item pool of 26 workplace bullying scenarios, that is, short descriptions of…