A previous study (Ke, I. 2012. From EFL to English as an international and scientific language: analysing Taiwan's high-school English textbooks in the period 1952-2009. "Language, Culture and Curriculum," 25(2), 173-187) on the trend of English textbooks in Taiwanese high schools showed that the proportion of the lessons embedded in…

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…

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…

This paper focused on the analysis of test items constructed in the paper of teaching Physical Science for B.Ed. class. It involved the analysis of difficulty level and discrimination power of each test item. Item analysis allows selecting or omitting items from the test, but more importantly item analysis is a tool to help the item writer improve…

Professional Development Engagement (PDE) refers to the level of undergraduate engagement in professional development. Professional Development (PD) involves activities designed to help students prepare for a successful college-to-work transition. This study tested a new 12-item measure of PDE for a complete-data sample of 246 undergraduate…

The purpose of this study is to validate the widely adopted Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES) for the East Asian context. The researchers seek to find out whether TSES holds validity and reliability and is appropriate for use to measure teacher efficacy in China, Korea, and Japan. 489 teachers from the three countries participated in the…

This article describes the development and psychometric properties of the Community Impact Scale (CIS), a measure of benefits and costs of community-university partnerships across a range of outcomes as perceived by community partners. Scale development was carried out in two phases: (a) item generation, through which the research team, in close…

The "Parenting Stress Index, Fourth Edition" (PSI-4) is a 120-item measure used to explore parental stress levels considering a parent's relationship with one of his or her children between the ages of 1 month and 12 years. The main purpose of the test is to define these stress levels and from where they originate in order to identify…

The communicative language teaching approach has dominated English teaching and learning since the 1970s. In Taiwan, standardized and highstakes English tests also put focus on the assessment of learners' communicative competence. While the test contents change, the modifications teachers made are superficial rather than substantial. A comparative…

Investigating the psychometric properties of a screening instrument for young children is necessary to ascertain its quality and accuracy. In light of the important role culture plays on human beliefs and parenting styles, a newly translated and adapted test needs to be studied. Evaluating outcomes on a translated version of a test may reveal…

This study investigated Korean college students' performance as measured by two different vocabulary assessment tools (the Productive Vocabulary Levels Test (PVLT) and the Productive Vocabulary Use Task (PVUT)) and the relationship these assessments have with students' writing proficiency. A total of 72 students participated in the study. The…