The Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency -- Second Edition (BOT-2) is a commonly used assessment of children's skills. It is important that assessments have validity evidence reported about them. The objective of the study was to investigate the structural validity of the BOT-2's eight subscales and four composite scales. A sample of 117…

In Australia, one of the key findings of the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group was that not all graduating pre-service teachers possess adequate pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) to teach effectively. The concern is that higher education providers working with pre-service teachers are using pedagogical practices and assessments which…

It is important for self-report scales and measures used by educators and health care professionals (such as the Physical Self-Description Questionnaire-Short Form [PSDQ-S]) to have documented reliability and validity. The aim of this study is to investigate the structural validity of the full PSDQ-S composite scale and 11 subscales using the…

Standardized testing is ubiquitous in educational assessment, but questions have been raised about the extent to which these test scores accurately reflect students' genuine knowledge and skills. To more rigorously investigate this issue, the current study employed a within-subject experimental design to examine item format effects on primary…

It is well known that information from spoken language is integrated into reading processes, but the nature of these links and how they are acquired is less well understood. Recent evidence has suggested that predictions about the written form of newly learned spoken words are already generated prior to print exposure. We extend this work to…

Recent research has shown how the statistical bias in Rasch model difficulty estimates induced by guessing in multiple-choice items can be eliminated. Using vertical scaling of a high-profile national reading test, it is shown that the dominant effect of removing such bias is a nonlinear change in the unit of scale across the continuum. The…

This article describes the development and validation of a newly designed instrument for measuring the spatial ability of middle school students (11-13 years old). The design of the Spatial Reasoning Instrument (SRI) is based on three constructs (mental rotation, spatial orientation, and spatial visualization) and is aligned to the type of spatial…

The development of information technologies has transformed the environment in which young people access, create, and share information. Many countries, having recognized the imperative of digital technology, acknowledge the need to educate young people in the use of these technologies so as to underpin economic and social benefits. This article…

Models of modern test theory imply statistical independence among responses, generally referred to as "local independence." One violation of local independence occurs when the response to one item governs the response to a subsequent item. Expanding on a formulation of this kind of violation as a process in the dichotomous Rasch model,…

As we move into the 21st century, educationalists are exploring the myriad of possibilities associated with Computer Based Assessment (CBA). At first glance this mode of assessment seems to provide many exciting opportunities in the mathematics domain, yet one must question the validity of CBA and whether our school systems, students and teachers…

Background: This study developed from observations of apparent achievement differences between male and female chemistry performances in a state university entrance examination. Male students performed more strongly than female students, especially in higher scores. Apart from the gender of the students, two other important factors that might…

How to compute and report subscores for a test that was originally designed for reporting scores on a unidimensional scale has been a topic of interest in recent years. In the research reported here, we describe an application of multidimensional item response theory to identify a subscore structure in a test designed for reporting results using a…

The assessment of literacy and numeracy skills of students as they enter school for the first time is not yet established nation-wide in Australia. However, a large proportion of primary schools have chosen to assess their starting students on the Performance Indicators in Primary Schools-Baseline Assessment (PIPS-BLA). This series of three…

The Assessment of Language Competence (ALC) certificates is an annual, international testing program developed by the Australian Council for Educational Research to test the listening and reading comprehension skills of lower to middle year levels of secondary school. The tests are developed for three levels in French, German, Italian and…

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the Western Australian Calculus Tertiary Entrance Examination (TEE) papers for 1996-99, two years before and two years after the introduction of graphics calculators on the examination. Changes in the questions that asked students to graph rational functions and students' answers to the corresponding…