Computer-adaptive testing (CAT) allows improved security, greater scoring accuracy, shorter testing periods, quicker availability of results, and reduced guessing and other undesirable test behavior. Simple approaches can be applied by the classroom teacher, or other content specialist, who possesses simple computer equipment and elementary…

Three studies were conducted to investigate reasons for the difficulties that children under 5 years of age experience with class inclusion tasks. The studies tested the claim that such tasks have a structural complexity that is beyond the children's processing ability. In experiment 1, class inclusion tasks were compared with other classification…

In an experiment using a conditional logic task, subjects were given a set of cards defining a particular conditional relationship. The subjects were required to determine the rule and predict the outcomes of the rule. Rule structure was varied by providing subjects with either a suggested rule, a partial rule, or no rule for each set of cards.…

Setting standards for the purpose of certification is frequently performed using judgmental techniques such as the Angoff method. This study was performed to identify types of items that judges find hard to rate accurately, that is, types of items on which examinees perform differently than predicted by the judges. Once identified these item types…

Two studies compared the effects of spontaneous and controlled imagery on reality monitoring decisions. Reality monitoring refers to the decision processes involved in discriminating perceptual memories from imaginal ones. In Experiment 1, 6-year-olds and adults were shown pictures and words and they responded to one of two questions: (1)…

The purpose of the present investigation is to examine the influence of sample size (N) and model complexity on a set of 23 goodness-of-fit (GOF) indices, including those typically used in confirmatory factor analysis. The focus was on two potential problems in assessing GOF: (1) some fit indices are substantially influenced by N so that tests of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the division procedures of preschool children to determine whether such procedures involved one-to-one correspondence. Large and small numerosity trials were included so that the amount of effort and ease of using other procedures would vary. Odd and even number trials were included to determine whether…

Fisher's information measure for the item difficulty parameter in the Rasch model and its marginal and conditional formulations are investigated. It is shown that expected item information in the unconditional model equals information in the marginal model, provided the assumption of sampling examinees from an ability distribution is made. For the…

This report summarizes the results of more than 10,000 individual judgments, carried out in five related studies, all concerned with perceived reading efforts of text on visual displays and printouts. Students and personnel in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Stockholm served as study subjects. In experiments in which…

Children's ability to learn aspects of their language in the absence of supportive evidence is discussed. Specifically, the learnability of null subjects in languages in which they appear is examined when indirect negative evidence is present. It is concluded that parameters such as the null subject parameter may not generate languages, strictly…

A survey of the current research on readability formulas is presented in this paper, which distinguishes this research from research on the more general questions that surround formulas: What features of a text, particularly the language it is written in, make the text easy or difficult to read? and, What will predict that readers with particular…

Two experiments investigated causes of children's selection of easy tasks in task choice situations. Experiment 1 probed the effects of experimenter presence on task choices of 55 Japanese children ranging in age from 66 to 76 months, of whom 32 were boys and 23 were girls. A total of 30 subjects were assigned to an experimenter attending…

To investigate developmental differences, preschoolers' performance on four tasks frequently used to measure their understanding of causal and temporal relationships was studied. Based on an analysis of cognitive processes involved in recognition, completion, construction/seriation, and verbal explanation tasks, the prediction was made that…

Instructional time to high proficiency or response time to high proficiency performance can be viewed as linearly related to the effective complexity of the task/display combination which is the essence of instruction or of performance. This proposition is concretely illustrated for bar graph-using performance of 4th and 6th graders who under most…

The purpose of this paper is to present a generalization of the concept of item difficulty to test items that measure more than one dimension. Three common definitions of item difficulty were considered: the proportion of correct responses for a group of individuals; the probability of a correct response to an item for a specific person; and the…