the difficulty of assessing the writing skill is well known. different testing facets seem to affect the result of assessing the writing skill. in addition to the writer’s ability, the topic of the writing task, and methods of rating may contribute to the writer’s score. in this study, 50 efl learners wrote four different types of writing tasks (convincing, describing, instructing, and explaini...

Scoring models yield continuous predictions instead of sharp classifications. Scoring customers for profitability, loyalty, or product affinity corresponds to an inductive fuzzy classification: The model represents a continuous membership function mapping the set of customers into the fuzzy set of interesting customers – the fuzzy target group. This chapter presents a method for membership func...

In EFL programs, rating scales used in writing assessment are often constructed by intuition. Intuition-based scales tend to provide inaccurate and divisive ratings of learners’ writing performance. Hence, following an empirical approach, this study attempted to develop a rating scale for elementary-level writing at an EFL program in Saudi Arabia. Towards this goal, 98 students’ essays were sco...

Meta-analytic methods have been widely applied to education, medicine, and the social sciences. Much of meta-analytic data are hierarchically structured because effect size estimates are nested within studies, and in turn, studies can be nested within level-3 units such as laboratories or investigators, and so forth. Thus, multilevel models are a natural framework for analyzing meta-analytic da...

the difficulty of assessing the writing skill is well known. different testing facets seem to affect the result of assessing the writing skill. in addition to the writer’s ability, the topic of the writing task, and methods of rating may contribute to the writer’s score. in this study, 50 efl learners wrote four different types of writing tasks (convincing, describing, instructing, and explaini...

The difficulty of assessing the writing skill is well known. Different testing facets seem to affect the result of assessing the writing skill. In addition to the writer’s ability, the topic of the writing task, and methods of rating may contribute to the writer’s score. In this study, 50 EFL learners wrote four different types of writing tasks (convincing, describing, instructing, and explaini...

Reading comprehension is largely tested in schools using handwritten responses. The paper describes computational methods of scoring such responses using handwriting recognition and automatic essay scoring technologies. The goal is to assign to each handwritten response a score which is comparable to that of a human scorer even though machine handwriting recognition methods have high transcript...

The cognitive processes in a widely used, nonverbal test of analytic intelligence, the Raven Progressive Matrices Test (Raven, 1962), are analyzed in terms of which processes distinguish between higher scoring and lower scoring subjects and which processes are common to all subjects and all items on the test. The analysis is based on detailed performance characteristics, such as verbal protocol...