As multi/plurilingual research advances understandings of plurilingual speakers' fluid language use, particularly in multilingual settings, new research methods and pedagogical orientations that address this complex phenomenon are needed. The present study considered the development, reliability, and validity of the Plurilingual and Pluricultural…

We illustrate the application of mixture IRT models to evaluate respondent confusion due to the negative wording of certain items on a social-emotional learning (SEL) assessment. Using actual student self-report ratings on four social-emotional learning scales collected from students in grades 3-12 from CORE Districts in the state of California,…

The Research Methods Skills Assessment (RMSA) was created to measure psychology majors' statistics knowledge and skills. The American Psychological Association's Guidelines for the Undergraduate Major in Psychology (APA, 2007, 2013) served as a framework for development. Results from a Rasch analysis with data from n = 330 undergraduates showed…

Representational competence is essential for the acquisition of conceptual understanding in physics. It enables the interpretation of diagrams, graphs, and mathematical equations, and relating these to one another as well as to observations and experimental outcomes. In this study, we present the initial validation of a newly developed…

Research on the graphical facilitation of probabilistic reasoning has been characterised by the effort expended to identify valid assessment tools. The authors developed an assessment instrument to compare reasoning performances when problems were presented in verbal-numerical and graphical-pictorial formats. A sample of undergraduate psychology…

Multiple test tasks are available for assessing L2 collocation knowledge. However, few studies have investigated the characteristics of a variety of recognition and recall tasks of collocation simultaneously, and most research on L2 collocations has focused on verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations. This study investigates (1) the relative…

This article describes the development and psychometric properties of the Community Impact Scale (CIS), a measure of benefits and costs of community-university partnerships across a range of outcomes as perceived by community partners. Scale development was carried out in two phases: (a) item generation, through which the research team, in close…

Children's theory of mind (ToM) is typically measured with laboratory assessments of performance. Although these measures have generated a wealth of informative data concerning developmental progressions in ToM, they may be less useful as the sole source of information about individual differences in ToM and their relation to other facets of…

The present study used the mixed Rasch model (MRM) to identify subgroups of readers within a sample of students taking an EFL reading comprehension test. Six hundred and two (602) Chinese college students took a reading test and a lexico-grammatical knowledge test and completed a Metacognitive and Cognitive Strategy Use Questionnaire (MCSUQ)…

Performing routines in interlanguage is vitally important for EFL learners since it can cause embarrassment between speakers from different cultures. The present study aims to 1) investigate the reliability and validity of an interlanguge pragmatic competence test on routines in a Chinese EFL context with multiple choice discourse completion task…

Objective: The purpose of this study was to develop a comprehensive health literacy assessment tool for young adult college students. Participants: Participants were 144 undergraduate students. Methods: Two hundred and twenty-nine questions were developed, which were based on concepts identified by the US Department of Health and Human Services,…

Teachers' professional knowledge is assumed to be a key variable for effective teaching. As teacher education has the goal to enhance professional knowledge of current and future teachers, this knowledge should be described and assessed. Nevertheless, only a limited number of studies quantitatively measures physics teachers' professional…

The goal of test design is to devise an instrument that will provide a stable and accurate assessment of student ability in some area. One means of reaching this goal is through the use of latent trait models, which determine the relationship between the unobservable trait or ability and the observable test performance. Three common latent trait…

Describes an analysis of test items used to measure the science process skills of 11-year-olds in Great Britain. Concludes that the level of cognitive demand was a reliable predictor of the difficulty of an item. (TW)

In an effort to standardize academic application procedures, the Standardized Letter of Recommendation (SLR) was developed to capture important cognitive and noncognitive qualities of graduate school candidates. The SLR consists of seven scales ("knowledge," "analytical skills," "communication skills,"…