The Cognitive Science Research group at ETS conducts research and development at the forefront of educational assessment, using cognitive theory in the design of assessments, building cognitive models to guide interpretation of test-takers’ performance, and researching cognitive issues in the context of assessment. Moving beyond traditional (e.g., multiple-choice) tests, the group investigates ...

Background Large-scale assessments in education are typically administered using multiple test forms or booklets in which the same items are presented in different positions or locations within the forms. The main purpose of this practice is to improve test security by reducing the possibility of cheating among test takers (Debeer and Janssen 2013). This practice also helps test developers admi...

Cut scores are test scores used in mastery testing and in certification tests to identify those test takers who appear to have achieved at a predetermined level of proficiency. Cut scores are often used to differentiate test takers on a passfail basis. This paper takes up points raised by Berk (2000), discussing the use of reliability and error indices which are particularly appropriate for tes...

Multiple-choice tests play a large role in determining academic and professional outcomes. Performance on these tests hinges not only on a test-taker’s knowledge of the material but also on his willingness to guess when unsure about the answer. In this paper, we present the results of an experiment that explores whether women skip more questions than men. The experimental test consists of pract...

The main concern of the present study is to probe the relationship between note-taking strategy and students' listening comprehension (LC) ability. To conduct the study, a language proficiency test was administered to the undergraduate students majoring in English Translation at Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz and sixty students were selected to enter into the next phase of the experiment. T...

The present study investigated test-taking motivation in L2 listening testing context by applying Expectancy-Value Theory as the framework. Specifically, this study was intended to examine the complex relationships among expectancy, importance, interest, listening anxiety, listening metacognitive awareness, and listening test score using data from a large-scale and high-stakes language test amo...

Good language learners slot in a repertoire of strategies and when language tests are at stake, test-taking strategies and test-wiseness pave pay to a prolific outcome. Among such tests, TOEFL iBT seems to be a prerequisite to academic success and a nightmare many Iranian students struggle with. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to raise awareness about the type of questions in iBT, b...

Computer adaptive testing (CAT) is a kind of tailored testing, in that it is a form of computer-based testing that is adaptive to each test-taker's ability level. In this review, the impacts of CAT are discussed from different perspectives in order to illustrate crucial points to keep in mind during the development and implementation of CAT. Test developers and psychometricians often emphasize ...