Every decision made in the classroom has the potential to either help or hurt a student's development as a learner. When students' mental and emotional well-being are taken into account, effective instruction and assessment are possible, despite the importance of learners' engagement in assessment (LEA), test-taking skills (TTS), self-assessment…

A conceptualization of multiple-choice exams in terms of signal detection theory (SDT) leads to simple measures of item difficulty and item discrimination that are closely related to, but also distinct from, those used in classical item analysis (CIA). The theory defines a "true split," depending on whether or not examinees know an item,…

Much of the learning that college students engage in today occurs in unsupervised settings, making effective self-regulated learning techniques of particular importance. We examined the impact of task difficulty and supervision on whether participants would follow written instructions to use repeated testing over restudying. In Study 1, we found…

With the immense interest in ChatGPT worldwide, education has seen a mix of both excitement and skepticism. To properly evaluate its impact on education, it is crucial to understand how far it can help students without prior knowledge answer assessment questions. This study aims to address this question as well as the impact of the question type.…

In the wake of the COVID-19 boom in remote administration of language tests, it appears likely that remote administration will be a permanent fixture in the language testing landscape. Accordingly, language test providers, stakeholders, and researchers must grapple with the implications of remote proctoring on valid, fair, and just uses of tests.…

There is widespread belief that test-taking ability is an influential component of academic success distinct from domain knowledge and comprehension. Most of today's college students took many more tests over the course of their primary and secondary education than students of previous generations, and also participated in regular training to…

Panel attrition is a major problem in long-term panel studies. While the design of the German National Educational Panel Study adult survey--combining biannual competency tests with regular face-to-face interviews--is highly innovative, such a design could raise respondent burden and thus potentially increase panel attrition and nonresponse bias.…

Reading comprehension tests involve not only reading passages and answering questions but also making choices such as the test-taking strategy to use, whether to search passages for answers, and where to begin searching. We examined the associations between student characteristics, passage type, test-taking strategies, and students' time searching…

Studying development processes, as they unfold over time, involves collecting repeated measures from individuals and modeling the changes over time. One methodological challenge in this type of longitudinal data is separating retest effects, due to the repeated assessments, from developmental processes such as maturation or age. In this article,…

Many different elements have a significant impact on the effectiveness of both teaching and assessment. The ever-expanding body of research on assessment has provided an overview of several cognitive, social, and emotional aspects that impact the academic accomplishment of learners in either a direct or indirect manner. In spite of the promising…

In previous studies, problem solving appraisal has been identified as playing a key role in promoting positive psychological well-being. The Problem Solving Inventory is the most widely used measure of problem solving appraisal and consists of 32 items. The length of the instrument, however, may limit its applicability to large-scale surveys…

Formative assessments have been shown to improve student success; however, the format in which these assessments are implemented has not been well researched. In this study, individual Anatomy and Physiology lab sections were administered formative assessments composed of either a projected (i.e. 'shared-display') quiz presentation or a…

High-stakes reading tests significantly influence one's future success, leading many second language learners to engage in intensive test preparation. This study examines nine TOEFL reading preparation lectures from two popular cram schools, or [foreign characters omitted] "hagwons," in Korea, with a total duration of five hours and…

Two-tiered assessment structures with paired content and confidence items are frequently used within chemistry assessments to stimulate and measure students' metacognition. The confidence judgment is designed to promote students' reflection on their application of content knowledge and can be characterized as calibrated or miscalibrated based on…

Administrative problems such as computer malfunction and power outage occasionally lead to missing item scores and hence to incomplete data on mastery tests such as the AP and U.S. Medical Licensing examinations. Investigators are often interested in estimating the probabilities of passing of the examinees with incomplete data on mastery tests.…