When taking multiple-choice tests of reading comprehension such as the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), test takers use a range of strategies that vary in the extent to which they emphasize reading the questions versus reading the passages. Researchers have challenged the construct validity of these tests because test takers can achieve better-than-chance performance even if they do not read t...

Recent versions of international high-stakes tests like TOEFL and IELTS have made use of integrated tasks in addition to the traditional independent tasks in a claim to provide a more realistic estimation of the test takers’ language abilities. The present study aimed to investigate how test takers’ performance may differ on such tasks. As such, the test takers’ performance was compared on IELT...

Cheating is a common phenomenon in high stakes admission, licensing and university exams and threatens their validity. To detect if some exam questions had been affected by cheating, we simulated how data would look like if some test takers possessed item preknowledge: Responses to a small number of items were set to correct for 1-10% of test takers. Item difficulty, item discrimination, item f...

Standards-referenced educational reform has increased the prevalence of standardized testing; however, whether these tests accurately measure students' competencies has been questioned. This may be due to domain-specific assessments placing a differing domain-general cognitive load on test-takers. To investigate this possibility, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to identify...

An accurately calibrated item bank is essential for a valid computerized adaptive test. However, in some settings, such as organizational testing, there is limited access to test takers for calibration. As a result of the limited access to possible test takers, collecting data to accurately calibrate an item bank is usually difficult. In such a setting, the item bank can be calibrated online in...