Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are widely used in educational assessments and professional certification exams. Managing large repositories of MCQs, however, poses several challenges due to the high volume of questions and the need to maintain their quality and relevance over time. One of these challenges is the presence of questions that…

This dissertation reports development and validation studies of a Web-based standardized test of Japanese as a foreign language (JFL), designed to measure learners' off-line grammatical and pragmatic knowledge in multiple-choice format. Targeting Japanese majors in the U.S. universities and colleges, the test is designed to explore possible…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether item difficulty is significantly affected by language difficulty and response set convergence. Language difficulty was varied by increasing sentence (stem) length, increasing syntactic complexity, and substituting uncommon words for more familiar terms in the item stem. Item wording ranged from…