although decisions or inferences we make based on test scores depend both on characteristics of test-takers and of testing sit- uations, there is just little research which has been undertaken on the effects of these characteristics on test performance (e.g., in’nami, 2006). the effect of listening strategies on listening performance is also unde- niable (vandergrift, 1997). thus, considering t...

OBJECTIVE Risk taking affects human behavior in general and decisions in medicine in particular. We used game theory to assess physicians' risk-taking tendencies. METHODS Physicians were recruited to the study by advertisement. It was explained that they would receive a sum of money for correct prediction of the flipping of a coin. They could try to sell their opportunity to flip the coin for...

As a mixed-method study, this study investigated EFL test-takers’ perceptions of paired speaking tests and the role of interlocutor variables (i.e., peer interlocutor’s acquaintanceship, gender, and proficiency level) in pairing in a Cambridge English Language Assessment Open Center. The participants (N = 148), having experienced sitting either live paired speaking tests of Cambridge E...

This paper examines the effect of gender and type of stem on Iranian test takers’ performance on the grammar section of a nation-wide language proficiency test. In so doing, the scores of 2931 examinees (1107 female and 1824 male) who sat Tarbiat Modares English proficiency test were obtained. The examinees’ scores on three types of MC grammar items with different kinds of stems (i.e., blank fi...

In perfect competition, there is a sense in which no supplier makes any purposeful, meaningful decision regarding the price that it sets. Rather, because of perfect substitutability between all products (recall the assumption of homogenous goods in a perfectly-competitive market), firms are all price-takers. A view of firms as price-takers is incompatible with the notion that we would now like ...

Background The validity of inferences based on (average) test scores obtained from large-scale assessments depends heavily on test-takers’ engagement when taking the test, that is, the degree to which they were motivated to show what they actually know and can do, in other words, to deliver their maximum performance (Cronbach 1970). However, in Abstract Background: A potential problem of low-st...

We investigate whether questions generated automatically by two Natural Language Processing (NLP) based systems (one developed by the authors, the other a state-of-the-art system) can successfully be used to assist multimedia-based learning. We examine the feasibility of using a Question Generation (QG) system’s output as pre-questions; with different types of pre-questions used: text-based and...