Enemy items are two test items that should not be presented to a candidate on the same test. Identifying enemies is essential for personnel assessment, as they weaken the measurement precision and validity of a test. In this research, we examined the effectiveness of lexical and semantic natural language processing techniques for identifying enemy…

Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) are a popular assessment method because they enable automated evaluation, flexible administration and use with huge groups. Despite these benefits, the manual construction of MCQs is challenging, time-consuming and error-prone. This is because each MCQ is comprised of a question called the "stem", a…

Multiple-choice question (MCQ) plays a significant role in educational assessment. Automatic MCQ generation has been an active research area for years, and many systems have been developed for MCQ generation. Still, we could not find any system that generates accurate MCQs from school-level textbook contents that are useful in real examinations.…

The United States history survey course is a standard high school history class in the state of New York. The academic goal is for students to understand key people and developments that molded the United States into its modern identity as a progressive, democratic nation-state. This research examined one manifestation of this course in New York…

Assessment plays an important role in learning and Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) are quite popular in large-scale evaluations. Technology-enabled learning necessitates a smart assessment. Therefore, automatic MCQ generation became increasingly popular in the last two decades. Despite a large amount of research effort, system generated MCQs are…

Despite their drawback, multiple-choice questions are an enduring feature in instruction because they can be answered more rapidly than open response questions and they are easily scored. However, it can be difficult to generate good incorrect choices (called "distractors"). We designed an algorithm to generate distractors from a…

Purpose: This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian…

Arabic is one of the largest donor languages to Malay and Persian. This study explores the benefits of Arabic vocabulary in teaching Malay words of Arabic origin to Persian-speaking students using a vocabulary survey containing 40 Malay words of Arabic origin, most of which retain phonetic or semantic similarity in Persian. Participants were 20…

Background: We adopted a theoretical framework that the acquisition of a scientific concept comprises the development of connections among conceptual elements associated with a scientific term within a mental semantic network. Given this framework, the hypothesis that the surrounding words connected with a scientific term are relevant to the…

To evaluate the sensitivity of multiple-choice cloze (MCC) tests that use different types of items--syntactic, semantic, and connective--to assess reading ability, 170 English as a foreign language (EFL) students in a vocational college in Taiwan were recruited. The students were divided into two groups (level A and level B) based on their scores…

The present experiments investigated the influence of combined phonological and semantic information on lexical retrieval, metacognitive retrieval states, and selection in an immediate multiple-choice task. Younger and older adults attempted to retrieve words (e.g., abdicate) from low-frequency word definitions. Retrieval was preceded by primes…

Automating the production of questions for assessment and self-assessment has become recently an active field of study. The use of Semantic Web technologies has certain advantages over other methods for question generation and thus is one of the most important lines of research for this problem. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of…

The present study investigates the best factor for controlling the item difficulty of multiple-choice English vocabulary questions generated by an automatic question generation system. Three factors are considered for controlling item difficulty: (1) reading passage difficulty, (2) semantic similarity between the correct answer and distractors,…

In recent years, computerized adaptive testing (CAT) has gained popularity as an important means to evaluate students' ability. Assigning tags to test questions is crucial in CAT. Manual tagging is widely used for constructing question banks; however, this approach is time-consuming and might lead to consistency issues. Automatic question tagging,…

This ethnography examines how teachers interpret and enact language-in-education policies in an adult ESL classroom in the United States, where students simultaneously received job training as Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs). We draw on postmodern and interpretive lenses from the ethnography of communication, considering how workforce-oriented…