This study aims to examine the impacts of the inquiry learning strategies employed in a "Plastic Education Project" on primary students' knowledge, beliefs and intended behaviour in Hong Kong. Student questionnaires and a test on plastic types were adopted for data collection. Results reveal that the inquiry learning strategies…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether multiple-choice item difficulty could be predicted either by a subjective judgment by the question author or by applying a learning taxonomy to the items. Eight physiology faculty members teaching an upper-level undergraduate human physiology course consented to participate in the study. The…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the validity of using bilingual test to measure the mathematics achievement of students who have limited English proficiency (LEP). The bilingual test and the English-only test consist of 20 computation and 20 word problem multiple-choice questions (from TIMSS 2003 and 2007 released items. The bilingual test…

Multiple-choice exams are often the standard in large, introductory college courses. Although students sometimes report that multiple-choice exams are easier than essay exams, the multiple-choice format often proves to be more difficult. This may be true because multiple-choice exams in college are often composed predominantly of application…

The main purpose of this study was to compare the strategies used by Chinese-speaking students when confronted with familiar versus unfamiliar topics in a multiple-choice format reading comprehension test. The focus was on describing what students do when they are taking reading comprehension tests by asking students to verbalize their thoughts.…

Educational reform efforts have led to increased use of alternatives to the traditional binary-scored multiple choice item. Many stimuli employed by these alternative assessments yield complex responses that require complex scoring rules. Some of these new item types can be polytomously-scored. Differential item functioning (DIF) assessment is a…

The reliability and validity of professionally written multiple-choice exams have been extensively studied for exams such as the SAT, graduate record examination, and the force concept inventory. Much of the success of these multiple-choice exams is attributed to the careful construction of each question, as well as each response. In this study,…

The functioning of a cognitive taxonomy within the test specifications of an allied health certification examination was studied. The taxonomy used was a simplification of the scheme of B. S. Bloom (1956), in which items were classified as comprehension, application, or analysis. Whether items written purposely to assess higher order cognitive…

The consequences in terms of misclassifications of students that would occur by replacing the constructed-response portion of the Advanced Placement (AP) examinations in economics with more multiple-choice items were studied. The 1991 AP examinations in micro- and macroeconomics were used. Computer simulation found that a small but statistically…