Since the 1970s, assessment of competence in the health professions has been dominated by a discourse of psychometrics that emphasizes the conversion of human behaviors to numbers and prioritizes high-stakes, point-in-time sampling, and standardization. There are many advantages to this approach, including increased fairness to test takers; however, some limitations of overemphasis on this para...

The present study sought to understand the nature and level of foreign language (FL) anxiety among primary school students relationship between FL achievement. Changes in across groups three years were also examined. A total 631 (324 male, 307 female) aged 9–11 completed Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) that measured students’ anxiety. Our participants’ achievements as by low-st...

Prosody can be used to infer whether or not candidates fully understand a passage they are reading aloud. In this paper, we focused on automatic assessment of prosody in a read-aloud section for a high-stakes English test. A new method was proposed to handle fundamental frequency (F0) of unvoiced segments that significantly improved the predictive power of F0. The kmeans clustering method was u...

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of systematic desensitization (behavioral therapy and cognitive restructuring (cognitive therapy) in reducing high-stakes test anxiety. We hypothesized that cognitive restructuring would be superior to systematic desensitization in reducing the severity of the cognitive symptoms of anxiety, whereas systematic desensitization would be super...