Throughout the world, cut scores are an important aspect of a high-stakes testing program because they are a key operational component of the interpretation of test scores. One method for setting standards that is prevalent in educational testing programs--the Bookmark method--is intended to be a less cognitively complex alternative to methods…

For over 50 years, "seven plus or minus two" has been a commonly used guideline for gauging how many chunks of new information should be presented at one time in learning and performance situations. Often cited as the limit of working memory, this guideline was created as a result of misinterpreting an article by Miller (1956). More recent studies…

Practitioners often depend on item analysis to select items for exam forms and have a variety of options available to them. These include the point-biserial correlation, the agreement statistic, the B index, and the phi coefficient. Although research has demonstrated that these statistics can be useful for item selection, no research as of yet has…

Purpose: To examine multimodal spoken word-in-sentence recognition in children. Method: Two experiments were undertaken. In Experiment 1, the youngest age with which the multimodal sentence recognition materials could be used was evaluated. In Experiment 2, lexical difficulty and presentation modality effects were examined, along with test-retest…

Two different types of anchors are investigated in this study: a mini-version anchor and an anchor that has a less spread of difficulty than the tests to be equated. The latter is referred to as a midi anchor. The impact of these two different types of anchors on observed score equating are evaluated and compared with respect to systematic error…

The existing literature on Problem-based learning (PBL) mostly paints a positive picture. If there were more evidence of the limitations of PBL, more could be done to apply the appropriate interventions to optimize the experience of PBL for students. The purpose of this article is to discuss second year medical students' perceptions of the…

Cut-scores were set by expert judges on assessments of reading and listening comprehension of English as a foreign language (EFL), using the bookmark standard-setting method to differentiate proficiency levels defined by the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). Assessments contained stratified item samples drawn from extensive item…

In business education, the impacts of the globalization of markets, financial institutions, and economies exert increasing influence on the curriculum in business schools. Schools of business recognize the need to embed international experiences into their curriculum in order to prepare students for global context of the marketplace. Often,…

In order to effectively utilize the capabilities of virtual reality (VR) in supporting the desired learning outcomes, careful consideration in the design of instruction for VR learning is crucial. In line with this concern, previous work proposed an instructional design model that prescribes instructional methods to guide the design of VR-based…

The usefulness of the l[subscript z] person-fit index was investigated with achievement test data from 20 exams given to more than 3,200 college students. Results for three methods of estimating ? showed that the distributions of l[subscript z] were not consistent with its theoretical distribution, resulting in general overfit to the item response…

Metacognition refers to students' knowledge and regulation of cognition, as well as their accuracy in predicting their academic performance. This study addressed two major questions: 1) how do metacognitive knowledge, regulation and accuracy differ across domains?, and 2) how do students' individual differences relate to their reported…

Distinct theoretical perspectives, Cognitive Load Theory and Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) theory, have been used to examine individual differences the challenges faced with hypermedia learning. However, research has tended to use these theories independently, resulting in less robust explanations of hypermedia learning. This study examined the…

To design an effective computer science curriculum, educators require a systematic method of classifying the difficulty level of learning activities and assessment tasks. This is important for curriculum design and implementation and for communication between educators. Different educators must be able to use the method consistently, so that…

Since the emergence of eLearning in the 1990s, the craft of designing and developing online courseware has evolved alongside theoretical advances in the field. A variety of media combinations have been applied to course pages by eLearning practitioners, making it possible to examine learning concepts emerging from the research in the light of…

Past research into the ability of students to "bounce back" from everyday academic setback (academic buoyancy) has lacked sensitivity to the contexts in which children demonstrate this behavior. Here we aimed to contextualize past findings by reporting the results of an exploratory investigation that featured: (1) repeated measurement of…