There are many reasons to believe that open-ended (OE) and multiple-choice (MC) items elicit different cognitive demands of students. However, empirical evidence that supports this view is lacking. In this study, we investigated the reactions of test takers to an interactive assessment with immediate feedback and answer-revision opportunities for…

Validly assessing students with disabilities has been a challenge for decades but is increasingly vital to educational policy and practice in the current era of accountability. Numerous technological and policy developments have occurred in the past several years with the emergence and decline of various forms of alternate assessments. This study…

This study investigates the benefits of no-stakes educational testing during students' summer vacation as a strategy to mitigate summer learning loss. Fifty-one students in Grades 3-8 from the Every Child Valued (ECV) and Lawrence Community Center (LCC) summer programs in Lawrenceville, NJ, took short, online assessments throughout the summer,…

This report describes the development of grade norms for timed-writing performance in two modes of writing: persuasive and descriptive. These norms are based on objective and automatically computed measures of writing quality in grammar, usage, mechanics, style, vocabulary, organization, and development. These measures are also used in the…

The e-rater® system has been used by ETS for automated essay scoring since 1999. This paper describes a new version of e-rater (v.2.0) that differs from the previous one (v.1.3) with regard to the feature set and model building approach. The paper describes the new version, compares the new and previous versions in terms of performance, and…