A recent Educational Testing Services report (2016) found that international graduate students with a TOEFL score of 80--the minimum average TOEFL score for graduate admission in the United States--usually possess reading subscores of 20, equating to a 12th-grade reading comprehension level. However, one public flagship university's international…

The assessment of learning in large online courses requires tools that are valid, reliable, easy to administer, and can be automatically scored. We have evaluated an online assessment and learning tool called Knowledge Assembly, or Knowla. Knowla measures a student's knowledge in a particular subject by having the student assemble a set of…

Derived from Vygotsky's works, dynamic assessment (DA) enables learners to move beyond their current level of functioning through offering needs-sensitized mediation. This study aimed at exploring the learners' development in novel and increasingly more challenging situations called transcendence (TR) in an L2 context focusing on reading…

The Flesch readability index yields meaningful information about the responses of readers to texts. Because the formula is so simple, a group of English teachers wrote a program in BASIC that would count some obvious surface features of a text and calculate Flesch scores. Among the programing problems encountered were counting words (taking into…

Subjecting the comprehension passages of the Gates-McGinitie Reading Test to readability analysis using a multiformula computer program revealed that the instrument can best be used for making comparisons between groups using the same test forms and levels in the same sequence. (FL)