While significant research has been conducted on students' conceptions of energy, alternative conceptions of energy have not been actively explored in the area of environmental science. The purpose of this study is to examine students' alternative conceptions in the environmental science discipline through the analysis of responses of first year…

Learning chemistry includes learning the language of chemistry (names, formulae, symbols, and chemical equations) which has to be done in connection with the other areas of chemical knowledge. In this study we investigate how French students understand and use names (of chemical species and common mixtures) and chemical formulae. We set a paper…

Standardised and other multiple-choice examinations often require the use of an answer sheet with fill-in bubbles (i.e. "bubble" or Scantron sheet). Students with disabilities causing impairments in attention, learning and/or visual-motor skill may have difficulties with multiple-choice examinations that employ such a response style.…

This study uses the theoretical framework of domain-specific problem solving to explore the procedures students use to solve multiple-choice problems about biology concepts. We designed several multiple-choice problems and administered them on four exams. We trained students to produce written descriptions of how they solved the problem, and this…

This study compares School Leaders Licensure Assessment (SLLA) sub-scores with principal interns' self-assessment sub-scores (ISA) for a principal internship evaluation instrument in one educational leadership graduate program. The results of the study will be used to help establish the effectiveness of the current principal internship program,…

Item analysis of Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) is the process of collecting, summarizing and utilizing information from students' responses to evaluate the quality of test items. Difficulty Index (p-value), Discrimination Index (DI) and Distractor Efficiency (DE) are the parameters which help to evaluate the quality of MCQs used in an…

In this study, the cloze-elide test was developed and administered under time constraints. This research is aimed to examine the validity and reliability of the speeded cloze-elide test and investigate its relationship with reading comprehension, C-Test, and multiple-choice cloze test. Processing speed is a vital indicator to distinguish high to…

First-year engineering (FYE) students are routinely screened for spatial ability, with the goals of predicting retention in the major and identifying those who need supplementary spatial instruction. Psychometric tests used for such screenings are often domain-general measures that lack diagnostic information to inform remedial instruction. A new…

Automatic question generation can help teachers to save the time necessary for constructing examination papers. Several approaches were proposed to automatically generate multiple-choice questions for vocabulary assessment or grammar exercises. However, most of these studies focused on generating questions in English with a certain similarity…

The pedagogical approach for both didactic and laboratory teaching of anatomy has changed in the last 25 years and continues to evolve; however, assessment of student anatomical knowledge has not changed despite the awareness of Bloom's taxonomy. For economic reasons most schools rely on multiple choice questions (MCQ) that test knowledge mastered…

Prior research suggests that males outperform females, on average, on multiple-choice items compared to their relative performance on constructed-response items. This paper characterizes the extent to which gender achievement gaps on state accountability tests across the United States are associated with those tests' item formats. Using roughly 8…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to assess the knowledge on sport and exercise science held by a sample of Brazilian physiotherapists, nutritionists and physical educators. Design/methodology/approach: A cross-sectional research design was used. The answers given by 1,147 professionals (300 physiotherapists, 705 physical educators and 142…

In this thesis, I study some aspects of how students learn to use math to make sense of physical phenomena. Solving physics problems usually requires dealing with algebraic expressions. That can take the form of reading equations you're given, manipulating them, or creating them. It's possible to use equations simply according to formal rules of…

We report on a study investigating the influence of context, direction of translation, and function type on undergraduate students' ability to translate between graphical and symbolic representations of mathematical relations. Students from an algebra-based and a calculus-based physics course were asked to solve multiple-choice items in which they…

This study adopted the between-subjects and within-subjects group designs to examine the impact of visual aids on 26 intermediate Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) learners' reading comprehension in an American college. Students were assigned into two groups to complete multiple-choice and translation tasks to test effects of visual aids. The…