Although there exist a range of professional standards and guidelines for evaluating individuals from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, there is a conspicuous absence of approaches that meet or satisfy the recommendations related to fairness and equity, particularly with reference to English learners (ELs). ELs are defined simply as…

Solving a constructed-response item usually requires successfully performing a sequence of tasks. Each task could involve different attributes, and those required attributes may be "condensed" in various ways to produce the responses. The sequential generalized deterministic input noisy "and" gate model is a general cognitive…

Large-scale assessments are generally designed for summative purposes to compare achievement among participating countries. However, these nondiagnostic assessments have also been adapted in the context of cognitive diagnostic assessment for diagnostic purposes. Following the large amount of investments in these assessments, it would be…

Scenario-based writing assessment has two salient characteristics by design: a lead-in/essay scaffolding structure and a unified scenario/topic throughout. In this study, we examine whether the scenario-based assessment design would impact students' essay scores compared to its alternative conditions, which intentionally broke the scaffolding…

Dynamic Assessment (DA) is an interactive form of cognitive assessment used by some educational psychologists (EPs) to assess the learning potential of children and young people, through a focus on cognitive and affective aspects of learning. In terms of UK EP practice, this approach has the potential to complement the focus on 'person-centred…

It is generally assumed that bare numerals (e.g., "three") have two readings: the "exactly" and the "at least" reading. It has been a matter of debate whether one of these two readings is derived from the other pragmatically. To shed light on this question research has aimed at characterizing the processing demands…

Neural tuning to print develops when children learn to read and is reflected by a more pronounced left occipito-temporal negativity to orthographic stimuli as compared to non-orthographic false fonts or symbols after around 150-250 ms in their N1, a visual event-related potential (ERP). In adults, initial expertise for a novel script can emerge in…

Diagnostic classification models (DCMs, also known as cognitive diagnosis models) hold the promise of providing detailed classroom information about the skills a student has or has not mastered. Specifically, DCMs are special cases of constrained latent class models where classes are defined based on mastery/nonmastery of a set of attributes (or…

In 8 experiments using language processing tasks ranging from lexical decision to sensibility judgment, participants made hand or foot responses after reading hand- or foot-associated words such as action verbs. In general, response time (RT) tended to be faster when the hand- versus foot-associated word was compatible with the limb that was…

To maintain America's status as a global technological leader, there has been a longstanding effort to increase the quality and quantity of engineers in the workforce. Previous research and government reports have called on the education system at all levels to increase enrollment and persistence in college engineering programs. Additionally,…

In cognitive diagnosis assessment (CDA), the impact of misspecified item-attribute relations (or "Q-matrix") designed by subject-matter experts has been a great challenge to real-world applications. This study examined parameter estimation of the CDA with the expert-designed Q-matrix and two refined Q-matrices for international…

Numerous event-related potential (ERP) studies have examined adults' neural responses to child emotional expressions to understand the neurobiological mechanisms contributing to caregiving. It is unclear, however, whether one emotion evokes an enhanced response across components, and whether this pattern differs based on parent status or other…

Recent studies about learning and instruction use cognitive load measurement to pay attention to the human cognitive resources and to the consumption of these resources during the learning process. In order to validate different measures of cognitive load for different cognitive load factors, the present study compares three different methods of…

Automaticity allows us to perform tasks in a fast, efficient, and effortless manner after sufficient practice. Theories of automaticity propose that across practice processing transitions from being controlled by working memory to being controlled by long-term memory retrieval. Recent event-related potential (ERP) studies have sought to test this…

Researchers working on "metasyntactic abilities" (i.e., the metalinguistic ability associated with syntax) face the problem of defining and measuring them. Metasyntactic abilities is a multifaceted concept, which encompasses various types of behaviours, from being able to intentionally manipulate syntactic structures to being able to…