Educational assessment is used throughout the world for a range of different formative and summative purposes. Wherever an assessment is developed, whether by a teacher creating a quiz for their class, or by a testing company creating a high stakes assessment, it is necessary to decide how long the test should be. Specifically, how many questions…

Background: In PISA 2009, seven East Asian countries rank high among the 65 participating countries, but some of the differences among the seven countries are small to be of substantive meaning. Aims: This paper is an attempt to fine tune the comparisons for better understanding of the situation in East Asian. Sample: Data of the seven East Asian…

The current preoccupation in the United States with test-based accountability is founded on a set of faulty assumptions--about education practices elsewhere in the world, about international test score comparisons, and about the extent to which test scores are valid indicators of the quality of education or the state of the economy. For example,…