The Lawson's Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning (LCTSR) is a popular instrument that measures the development of students' scientific reasoning skills. The instrument has a two-tier question design, which has led to multiple ways of scoring and interpretation. In this research, a method of pattern analysis was proposed and applied to analyze…

The quality of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) as well as the student's solve behavior in MCQs are educational concerns. MCQs cover wide educational content and can be immediately and accurately scored. However, many studies have found some flawed items in this exam type, thereby possibly resulting in misleading insights into students'…

Relatively late mastery of scalar implicatures has been suggested to correlate with children's immature processing capacities, such as their limited working memory. Yet, many studies that tested for a link between children's working memory and their computation of scalar implicatures have failed to find any correlation. One possible reason is that…

The present study examined the performance of the bi-factor multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) model and higher-order (HO) cognitive diagnostic models (CDM) in providing diagnostic information and general ability estimation simultaneously in a listening test. The data used were 1,611 examinees' item-level responses to an in-house EFL…

Under the framework of item response theory (IRT) and generalizability (G-) theory, this study examined the effects of item difficulty on rating reliability and construct validity on both the constructed-response (CR) items and essay items on English examinations. The data collected for this study were students' scores and responses on the two…

This study focused on the effect of examinees' ability levels on the relationship between Reflective-Impulsive (RI) cognitive style and item response time in computerized adaptive testing (CAT). The total of 56 students majoring in Educational Technology from Shandong Normal University participated in this study, and their RI cognitive styles were…

This article is an overview of the National Assessment of Education Quality (NAEQ) of China in reading, mathematics, sciences, arts, physical education, and moral education at Grades 4 and 8. After a review of the background and history of NAEQ, we present the assessment framework with students' holistic development at the core and the design for…

Research shows that test method can exert a significant impact on test takers' performance and thereby contaminate test scores. We argue that common test method can exert the same effect as common stimuli and violate the conditional independence assumption of item response theory models because, in general, subsets of items which have a shared…

This article proposes a generalized distance discriminating method for test with polytomous response (GDD-P). The new method is the polytomous extension of an item response theory (IRT)-based cognitive diagnostic method, which can identify examinees' ideal response patterns (IRPs) based on a generalized distance index. The similarities between…

Testlets are subsets of test items that are based on the same stimulus and are administered together. Tests that contain testlets are in widespread use in language testing, but they also share a fundamental problem: Items within a testlet are locally dependent with possibly adverse consequences for test score interpretation and use. Building on…

This study examined the relative effectiveness of the multidimensional bi-factor model and multidimensional testlet response theory (TRT) model in accommodating local dependence in testlet-based reading assessment with both dichotomously and polytomously scored items. The data used were 14,089 test-takers' item-level responses to the testlet-based…

In some tests, examinees are required to choose a fixed number of items from a set of given items to answer. This practice creates a challenge to standard item response models, because more capable examinees may have an advantage by making wiser choices. In this study, we developed a new class of item response models to account for the choice…

This study compares two approaches to grammatical knowledge in language assessment: the structural view that regards grammatical knowledge as vocabulary and syntax (Bachman 1990), and the communicative view that perceives it as the binary combination of grammatical form and meaning (Purpura 2004). 1,491 second-year nursing students from eight…

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…

Within the general context of the attention being given to vocational education in China and imminent major reform in the English language vocational education curriculum, this paper describes the construction of a set of calibrated tests of reading skills, grammar and vocabulary knowledge to inform curriculum planners about levels of ability in…