South African higher education is plagued by low academic success rates. Academic development and support units can play an important role in addressing low academic success rates by assisting students in developing appropriate learning and study strategies. Limited information is available on students' learning and study strategy profiles and…

The study explored the application of closed-book, open-book and cheat-sheet exams in an undergraduate cost and management accounting course at a university in Ghana. 198 students participated in an exploratory study examining how the different exam types impact on exam scores, pre-exam anxiety and knowledge retention. The study improves on the…

This study was conducted with a total of 158 students from 6th, 7th and 8th grades in two different secondary schools located in Siirt in the academic year of 2020-2021 to examine students' anxiety about the science lesson in terms of various variables and to determine the reasons for science anxiety. The study was conducted on the basis of a…

This article is twofold: (a) it explored the impacts of mediation strategies on promoting cognitive modifiability in a dynamic assessment (DA) writing exam among ESP learners, and (b) it compared test-takers' performance in DA vs. static assessment (SA). The analysis drew on qualitative and quantitative data of a dynamic writing exam of classroom…

Multiple-choice testing is a staple within the U.S. higher education system. From classroom assessments to standardized entrance exams such as the GRE, GMAT, or LSAT, test developers utilize a variety of validated and heuristic driven item-writing guidelines. One such guideline that has been given recent attention is to randomize the position of…

Relieving test anxiety actions range from relaxation exercises to prescription medication. Humor can be a simple method of test anxiety relief. The current study was used to determine if humor, in the form of a cartoon, placed on the splash page of an online exam improved the test scores of students who have high test anxiety. In the current…

To inform the development of gamified assessments, this study explored how students with or at risk for reading difficulties in Grades 6-8 (N = 202) perceived and interacted with a decoding assessment designed with gamification characteristics. Three data sources enhanced the methodological triangulation: observations and scores from testing,…

A teacher's ability to read effectively is critical to that individual's ability to teach reading skills. Correspondingly, most state departments of education require that prospective teachers earn a passing score on a standardized reading comprehension test before they can enter university-based teacher education programs or otherwise get a…

Recently, research in second language acquisition has seen an increased attention on low-educated low-literate (LESLLA) learners. However, few of the existing instruments to measure L2 proficiency have been validated for use with this population. In this paper, we examine how adult L2 learners with diverging educational backgrounds perform on and…

Background: Variations in the skill profiles of learners have become an important research area in recent years. However, there is a lack of empirical research on this topic in Japan. We conducted three studies to address this gap. Methods: Study 1 investigated the characteristics of the flat and uneven skill profiles of Japanese learners of…

eLearning instruction has become an accepted means of delivering a quality education to higher education students, with community college online learning enrollment rates rising annually. Consistent with the desires of eLearning students for convenience and flexibility, educators utilize virtual proctored exams to safeguard against academic…

This article describes and reviews The School Motivation and Learning Strategies Inventory (SMALSI™; Stroud & Reynolds, 2006), published by Western Psychological Services, a self-report inventory designed to assess academic motivation, as well as learning and study strategies. The test identifies 10 primary constructs, referred to broadly as…

Pluralistic ignorance occurs when individuals misperceive a group norm and attempt to match the perceived--rather than actual--norm. Little is currently known about its role in the undergraduate classroom. The present research examined the pluralistic ignorance of studying behavior and its relationship with examination performance across four…

Does participation in one wave of a survey have an effect on respondents' answers to questions in subsequent waves? In this article, we investigate the presence and magnitude of "panel conditioning" effects in one of the most frequently used data sets in the social sciences: the General Social Survey (GSS). Using longitudinal records…

In high-stakes, large-scale, standardized tests with certain time limits, examinees are likely to engage in either one of the three types of behavior (e.g., van der Linden & Guo, 2008; Wang & Xu, 2015): solution behavior, rapid guessing behavior, and cheating behavior. Oftentimes examinees do not always solve all items due to various…