There has been a call from the national community of biologists and biology educators to increase biological literacy of undergraduate students, including understanding and application of core concepts. The structure and function relationship is a core concept identified by the wider biology community and by physiology faculty. Understanding of…

The framework and tools used for classroom assessment can have significant impacts on teacher practices and student achievement. Getting assessment right is an important component in creating positive learning experiences and academic success. Recent government reports (e.g., United States, Australia) call for the development of systems that use…

Income inequality has soared in the United States over the past half century. Has educational inequality increased alongside, in lockstep? Despite the topic's importance, surprisingly little scholarship has focused on long-term changes in the size of the achievement gap between students from higher and lower socioeconomic backgrounds. The authors'…

The AERA, APA, NCME Standards define validity as "the degree to which evidence and theory support the interpretations of test scores for proposed uses of tests". A century of disagreement about validity does not mean that there has not been substantial progress. This consensus definition brings together interpretations and use so that it…

The six primary papers in this issue of "Assessment in Education" emphasise a single primary point: the concept of validity is a complex one. Essentially, validity is a collective noun. That is, just as a group of players may be called a team and a group of geese a flock, so too does validity represent a variety of processes and…

As the largest and most innovative international assessment of adults, PIAAC marks an inflection point in the evolution of large-scale comparative assessments. PIAAC grew from the foundation laid by surveys that preceded it, and introduced innovations that have shifted the way we conceive and implement large-scale assessments. As the first fully…

General chemistry courses are often the foundation for the study of other science disciplines and upper-level chemistry concepts. Students who take introductory chemistry courses are more often from health and science-related fields than chemistry. As such, the content taught and assessed in general chemistry courses is envisioned as building…

A chemistry concept inventory (Chemical Concept Inventory 3.0/CCI 3.0) has been developed for assessing students learning and identifying the alternative conceptions that students may have in general chemistry. The conceptions in question are assumed to be mainly learned in school and to a less degree in student's daily life. The inventory…

Assessment of specific learning disabilities (SLD) in educational settings is one important function of a school psychologist. The federal definition of SLD describes "underlying cognitive processing deficits" as part of the assessment criteria, that is also incorporated in several states' SLD eligibility criteria, that is difficult to…

The current state of technology allows physicians to look up information in everyday practice using a wealth of medical resources. This change in practice may be important enough to consider it being reflected in medical certification exams, making the exam more similar to real practice. However, there is limited research comparing open- and…

Before an assessment is used to make decisions, the validity of the intended interpretation must be evaluated. The purpose of this paper is to describe how the argument-based approach and an interpretation/use argument (IUA) (Kane, 2013) were used to validate the interpretations made from the new Early Grade Mathematics Assessment (EGMA)…

The study aimed at identifying the reasons behind the Jordanian students' drop of performance in the TIMSS 2015 from the point of view of their teachers. Survey method was used because teachers are the most able to decide upon the reasons of this fall and so a questionnaire was designed to recognize their point of view concerning the reasons of…

Little is known about the early educational performance of children in migrant farmworker families. The authors examined the school readiness and early school success of 289 four-year-old preschool children of migrant families attending Redlands Christian Migrant Association centers. Children's school readiness was assessed and public school…

In L2 assessment research, assessments have traditionally been associated with large-scale testing or formal proficiency tests, primarily to record student achievement (Turner & Purpura, 2016). Classroom-based assessments (CBAs), then, are seen as offshoots of large-scale tests, thus, designed similarly (Turner, 2012). However, CBAs serve a…

Purpose: Over the last decades, many studies have documented the clinical potential of nonword repetition (NWR) tasks for detecting developmental language disorder in mono- (MON) and bilingual (BIL) children by unveiling their difficulties in short-term memory and phonological accuracy. However, the precise nature of the nonwords to be used and…