Combined the methods of alpha-stratified adaptive testing and constrained adaptive testing with shadow tests. Outlines the advantages of this approach in reducing overexposure and underexposure of items in an item pool and illustrates these advantages with an example from the Law School Admission Test. (SLD)

Compared the properties of five methods of item exposure control in the context of estimating examinees' abilities in a computerized adaptive testing situation. Findings show advantages to the Stocking and Lewis conditional multinomial procedure (M. Stocking and C. Lewis, 1995) and, to a lesser degree, the Davy and Parshall method (T. Davey and C.…

Conducted a meta-analysis to determine the extent to which the computer administration of a measure influences socially desirable responding. Discusses implications of the findings about impression management in terms of how they contribute to the explication of the construct of social desirability and cross-mode equivalence. (Author/SLD)

Evaluated three strategies for assigning examinees to grading categories in computerized adaptive testing. The expected a posteriori-based method had more correct classifications in the middle range of grade levels and more errors for the extremes than the golden section search grading test and the Z-score grading test. (SLD)

This study addressed the following question: Does a computerized test with an auto-score feature enhance students' test performance of phonic content compared to an existing paper-and-pencil test? Students in two four-semester-credit courses (teaching reading in the elementary school) formed the two treatment groups. The results indicate that on…

One attempt to make scores from large-scale assessments more interpretable has been to provide proficiency level scores to describe the meaning of student performance on tests. This study has examined the accuracy of Ercikan and Julian's (2002) guidelines for developing proficiency level scores and the classification accuracy of proficiency level…

What are other states doing to assess whether K-12 teachers are meeting the technology proficiency standards (NET) outlined by ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education)? What are alternatives to the IC3 test? This question was answered by contacting state leaders and also by finding information on the Internet. Many states have an…

One of the central challenges in mastering English is becoming sensitive to consistency from spelling to sound (i.e. phonological consistency) and from sound to spelling (i.e. orthographic consistency). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined the neural correlates of consistency in 9-15-year-old Normal and Impaired Readers…

This article presents selected aspects of a large study on the use of e-learning tools in support of assignment assessment, which was comprised of a substantial literature review, an investigation into electronic tools, and interviews with 90 academics at New Zealand tertiary institutions. The article makes two main contributions. Based on the…

The present highly developed status of psychological and educational testing in the United States is in part the result of many efforts over the past 100 years to develop economical and reliable methods of scoring. The present article traces a number of methods, ranging from hand scoring to present-day computer applications, stimulated by the need…

After reviewing past efforts related to computer-based reading disability (RD) assessment, we present a fully automated screening battery that evaluates critical skills relevant for RD diagnosis designed for unsupervised application in the Greek educational system. Psychometric validation in 301 children, 8-10 years old (grades 3 and 4; including…

Pre- and postcourse assessment has become a very important tool for education research in physics and other areas. The web offers an attractive alternative to in-class paper administration, but concerns about web-based administration include reliability due to changes in medium, student compliance rates, and test security, both question leakage…

The author investigated the impact of assessment methods on student performance on accounting tests. Specifically, the author used analysis of variance to determine whether the use of computer-based tests instead of paper-based tests affects students' traditional test scores in accounting examinations. The author included 2 independent variables,…

A total of 520 high school students were randomly assigned to a paper-and-pencil test (PPT), a computerized standard test (CST), or a computerized adaptive test (CAT) version of the Dutch School Attitude Questionnaire (SAQ), consisting of ordinal polytomous items. The CST administered items in the same order as the PPT. The CAT administered all…

This paper describes a study of the computer essay-scoring program BETSY. While the use of computers in rating written scripts has been criticised in some quarters for lacking transparency or lack of fit with how human raters rate written scripts, a number of essay rating programs are available commercially, many of which claim to offer comparable…