Published work on vocabulary assessment has grown substantially in the last 10 years, but it is still somewhat outside the mainstream of the field. There has been a recent call for those developing vocabulary tests to apply professional standards to their work, especially in validating their instruments for specified purposes before releasing them…

Testwiseness may introduce construct-irrelevant variance to multiple-choice test scores. Presenting response options sequentially has been proposed as a potential solution to this problem. In an experimental validation, we determined the psychometric properties of a test based on the sequential presentation of response options. We created a strong…

The main purpose of this study is to investigate guessing in the Yes/No (YN) format vocabulary test. One-hundred-and-five university students took a YN test, a translation task and a multiple-choice vocabulary size test (MC VST). With matched lexical properties between the real words and the pseudowords, pseudowords could index guessing in the YN…

Vocabulary size measures serve important functions, not only with respect to placing learners at appropriate levels on language courses but also with a view to examining the progress of learners. One of the widely reported formats suitable for these purposes is the Yes/No vocabulary test. The primary aim of this study was to introduce and provide…

On distractor-identification tests students mark as many distractors as possible on each test item. A grading scale is developed for this type testing. The score is optimal in that it yields an unbiased estimate of the student's score as if no guessing had occurred. (Author/JKS)

Nonrestricted-answer, multiple-choice test items are recommended as a way of including more facts and fewer incorrect answers in test items, and they do not cue successful guessing as restricted multiple choice items can. Examination construction, scoring, and reliability are discussed. (MSE)

Responses to a sample test were simulated for examinees under free-response and multiple-choice formats. Test score sets were correlated with randomly generated sets of unit-normal measures. The extent of superiority of free response tests was sufficiently small so that other considerations might justifiably dictate format choice. (Author/DWH)

A Monte Carlo design examined how the effects of guessing and item dependence influence test characteristics and student scores. Although validity for cloze variants was high, multiple-choice cloze had significantly lower reliabilities than did true score equivalents. (Author/PN)

A multiple matching test--a 24-item Hebrew vocabulary test--was examined, in which distractors from several items are pooled into one list at the test's end. Construction of such tests was feasible. Reliability, validity, and reduction of random guessing were satisfactory when applied to data from 717 applicants to Israeli universities. (SLD)

Classical measurement theory was used to investigate measurement characteristics of both parts of the Finding Embedded Figures Test (FEFT) when the test was: administered in either a "no guessing" supply format or a multiple-choice selection format; administered to either undergraduate college students or middle school students; and…