Feedback is a powerful instructional tool for motivating learning. But effective feedback, requires that instructors have accurate information about their students' current knowledge status and their learning progress. In modern educational measurement, two major theoretical perspectives on student ability and proficiency can be distinguished.…

Educational testing has been criticized for its disconnect from modern cognitive science and its limited role in improving instruction and student learning. Reform efforts emphasize the need for testing to provide specific diagnostic insights into students' skills and knowledge. Cognitive diagnosis (CD), an emerging paradigm in educational…

The goal of the present study was to extend earlier work on the estimation of person theta using maximum likelihood estimation in R by accounting for rapid guessing. This paper provides a modified R function that accommodates person thetas using the Rasch or 2PL models and implements corrections for the presence of rapid guessing or informed…

Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) test and related matrix-based tests are widely applied measures of cognitive ability. Using Bayesian Item Response Theory (IRT) models, I reanalyzed data of an SPM short form proposed by Myszkowski and Storme (2018) and, at the same time, illustrate the application of these models. Results indicate that…

The role of soft skills at school is still debated, but they have emerged as important factors for students' academic achievement and life satisfaction. This study focuses on the combined influence of soft skills (in terms of adaptability, curiosity, leadership, initiative, perseverance, and social awareness), extracurricular activities,…

Response control or inhibition is one of the cornerstones of modern cognitive psychology, featuring prominently in theories of executive functioning and impulsive behavior. However, repeated failures to observe correlations between commonly applied tasks have led some theorists to question whether common response conflict processes even exist. A…

U.S. Supreme Court justices and other federal judges are, effectively, appointed for life, with no built-in check on their cognitive functioning as they approach old age. There is about a century of research on aging and intelligence that shows the vulnerability of processing speed, fluid reasoning, visual-spatial processing, and working memory to…

The discrepancy between students' understanding of domain knowledge and their actual competencies to use tacit knowledge for a given task has been an issue to consider when instruction is designed, implemented, and revised. In this study, the researcher examines teaching and learning processes in which a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) design model…

Assessing job applicants' general mental ability online poses psychometric challenges due to the necessity of having brief but accurate tests. Recent research (Myszkowski & Storme, 2018) suggests that recovering distractor information through Nested Logit Models (NLM; Suh & Bolt, 2010) increases the reliability of ability estimates in…

This article summarizes assessment of cognitive skills through collaborative tasks, using field test results from the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) project. This project, sponsored by Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft, aims to help educators around the world enable students with the skills to succeed in future career and…

Background: A potential problem of low-stakes large-scale assessments such as the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is low test-taking engagement. The present study pursued two goals in order to better understand conditioning factors of test-taking disengagement: First, a model-based approach was used to…

Allowing respondents to retake a cognitive ability test has shown to increase their test scores. Several theoretical models have been proposed to explain this effect, which make distinct assumptions regarding the measurement invariance of psychometric tests across test administration sessions with regard to narrower cognitive abilities and general…

In the present study, speeded tasks with differing assumed difficulties of the trials are regarded as a special class of simple cognitive tasks. Exploratory latent growth modeling with data-driven shape of a growth curve and nonlinear structured latent curve modeling with predetermined monotonically increasing functions were used to analyze…

The purpose of the study was to investigate how grading in primary school affected students' achievement measured by grades in 7th, 8th and 9th Grade and educational attainment in upper secondary school (12th Grade), and how the effect varied as a function of students' cognitive ability, gender and socio-economic status. The data derived from the…

Despite the limitations of overgeneralizing cutoff values for confirmatory factor analysis (CFA; e.g., Marsh, Hau, & Wen, 2004), they are still often employed as golden rules for assessing factorial validity in sport and exercise psychology. The purpose of this study was to investigate the appropriateness of using the CFA approach with these…