The implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) has placed increased accountability for outcomes on both students and teachers. To address the current youth literacy crisis in the United States, the CCSS call for students to read increasingly complex informational and literary texts. Since teachers are held accountable for students'…

Background: The current study compared four differential item functioning (DIF) methods to examine their performances in terms of accounting for dual dependency (i.e., person and item clustering effects) simultaneously by a simulation study, which is not sufficiently studied under the current DIF literature. The four methods compared are logistic…

This study develops a model of analytic rating scales to assess L2 Chinese oral performance. It uses Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to identify a model and employs Confirmative Factor Analysis (CFA) in a separate dataset to test the degree of model fit. The researcher videotaped ten speeches and ACTFL professional raters assessed the oral…

Recently, an addiction matrix measure was assessed among U.S. former alternative high school youth. This presentation seeks to examine the generalizability of findings using this measure among Russian and Spanish high school adolescents. Latent class analysis was used to explore addiction subgroups among adolescents in Russia (average age = 16.27;…

Teachers' rooms are important parts of educational environments, as the quality of the physical-spatial and psychosocial conditions may affect the personal and occupational developments of teachers as well as the education processes. In Study 1 (n = 245), a Teachers' Rooms-Environmental Assessment Scale (TREAS) measure of the current conditions of…

Open-ended (OE) items are widely used to gather data on student performance in international achievement studies. However, several factors may threaten validity when using such items. This study examined Finnish coders' opinions about threats to validity when coding responses to OE items in the PISA 2012 problem-solving test. A total of 6…

Purpose: Numerous sustainability assessment tools are being created and applied in the higher education sector. In light of such diversity, there is a need to provide a common guideline for sustainability assessment which makes easier the comparison among universities. Using as a reference the Spanish university system, the main aim of this paper…

Objective: The measurement of Family Feedback on Child Welfare Services (FF-CWS) is gaining prominence as an efficacy indicator and is coherent with concerns about family-centered practice and empowerment. The aim of this study was to develop and validate an instrument that would overcome the scarcity of psychometrically sound measures in this…

In seeking to both confirm previous conclusions and expand the literature of the field with a different group of participants, McNulty (2012) was (partially) replicated. Three instructional interventions were designed to ascertain which activity type was responsible for learner gains. One treatment group (R) included referential-only practice…

Despite the growing recognition that second language (L2) listening is a skill incorporating the ability to process visual information along with the auditory stimulus, standardized L2 listening assessments have been predominantly operationalizing this language skill as visual-free (Buck, 2001; Kang, Gutierrez Arvizu, Chaipuapae, & Lesnov,…

This book is relevant for language testers, listening researchers, and oral proficiency teachers, in that it explores four broad themes related to the assessment of L2 listening ability: the use of authentic, real-world spoken texts; the effects of different speech varieties of listening inputs; the use of audio-visual texts; and assessing…

The IEA's International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) investigates the ways in which young people are prepared to undertake their roles as citizens in a range of countries in the second decade of the 21st century. ICCS 2016 is the second cycle of a study initiated in 2009. The ICCS 2016 user guide describes the content and format of…

Research suggests that spaced learning, compared with massed learning, results in superior long-term retention (the spacing effect). Son (2010) identified a potentially important moderator of the spacing effect: metacognitive control. Specifically, when participants chose massed restudy but were instead forced to space the restudy, the spacing…

The National Senior Certificate examination is the most important school examination in South Africa. Analysis of learners' performance in Mathematics in this examination is normally carried out and presented in terms of the percentage of learners who succeeded in the different bands of achievement. In some cases item difficulties are presented --…

Test developers often need to create unidimensional scales from multidimensional data. For item analysis, "marginal trace lines" capture the relation with the general dimension while accounting for nuisance dimensions and may prove to be a useful technique for creating short-form tests. This article describes the computations needed to obtain…