This paper describes the design and evaluation of the Organic chemistry Representational Competence Assessment (ORCA). Grounded in Kozma and Russell's representational competence framework, the ORCA measures the learner's ability to "interpret," "translate," and "use" six commonly used representations of molecular…

The Social Skills Improvement System-Rating Scales (SSIS-RS) and the Social Skills Improvement System Social and Emotional Learning Edition (SSIS SEL) are rating scales used to assess social behavior in children and adolescents. While the SSIS-RS is well-regarded and used worldwide, the SSIS SEL is establishing foothold. In the current study, we…

While the field advocates for a diversified and comprehensive professional role (National Association of School Psychologists, 2020), school psychologists have long spent most of their time in assessment-related activities (Farmer et al., 2021), averaging about eight cognitive evaluations monthly (Benson et al., 2020). Assessment practices have…

In Part 1 of this series, the authors briefly reviewed some challenges inherent in using standardized tools with students who are not well represented in norming data. To help readers clearly conceptualize the framework steps, the authors present two case studies that showcase how a nonstandardized approach to assessment can be individualized to…

Background: Educational assessments increasingly shift towards computer-based formats. Many studies have explored how different types of automated feedback affect learning. However, few studies have investigated how digital performance feedback affects test takers' ratings of affective-motivational reactions during a testing session. Method: In…

Background: Students take many tests and exams during their school career, but they usually receive feedback about their test performance based only on an analysis of the item responses. With the increase in digital assessment, other data have become available for analysis as well, such as log data of student actions in online assessment…

Starting in April 2025, ACT will introduce enhanced forms of the ACT® test for national online testing, with a full rollout to all paper and online test takers in national, state and district, and international test administrations by Spring 2026. ACT introduced major updates by changing the test lengths and testing times, providing more time per…

Purpose: College placement assessments often overlook multilingual learners' full linguistic abilities and literacy engagement, as standardized tests primarily assess English proficiency rather than how students interact with academic texts. Directed Self-Placement (DSP) offers an alternative approach through self-assessment, with some models…

In March of 2025, brightwheel, a San Francisco-based educational technology company, partnered with the Center for Research and Reform in Education (CRRE) at Johns Hopkins University to test brightwheel's product, the Experience Assessment. The assessment was designed to provide early childhood educators with an objective and systematic way to…

This study evaluated the impact of subgroup weighting for equating through a common-item anchor. We used data from a single test form to create two research forms for which the equating relationship was known. The results showed that equating was most accurate when the new form and reference form samples were weighted to be similar to the target…

Clinical, medical, and health psychologists use difference scores obtained from pretest--posttest designs employing the same test to assess intraindividual change possibly caused by an intervention addressing, for example, anxiety, depression, eating disorder, or addiction. Reliability of difference scores is important for interpreting observed…

A mixture of logit models is proposed that discriminates between responses to rating questions that are affected by a tendency to prefer middle or extremes of the scale regardless of the content of the item (response styles) and purely content-driven preferences. Explanatory variables are used to characterize the content-driven way of answering as…

Background: In academic contexts, teachers' judgements are central to instruction and have many consequences for students' self-perceptions. Understanding the cognitive biases that may exist in teachers' judgements is thus of central importance. Aims: This paper presents two studies in which we aimed to investigate the presence of a halo effect in…

In this article, it is shown how item text can be represented by (a) 113 features quantifying the text's linguistic characteristics, (b) 16 measures of the extent to which an information-retrieval-based automatic question-answering system finds an item challenging, and (c) through dense word representations (word embeddings). Using a random…

The estimation of high-dimensional latent regression item response theory (IRT) models is difficult because of the need to approximate integrals in the likelihood function. Proposed solutions in the literature include using stochastic approximations, adaptive quadrature, and Laplace approximations. We propose using a second-order Laplace…