Category Archives: Tests and Assessments

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Heading to Paris for the OECD seminar on “Translating and Adapting Instruments in Large Scale Assessments” (June 7-8), and proud to have two cApStAn speakers at this important meeting, designed to foster discussion and “cross-fertilisation of ideas” between different stakeholders: Danina Lupsa, one of our …

“OECD seminar on “Translating and adapting Instruments in Large Scale Assessments””

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village In this interesting article for EdTech magazine, digital citizenship is defined as ” a set of responsibilities all internet users should practice”. The issue of digital citizenship is gaining momentum worldwide and, given the early age at which children start to use internet, it has …

“Incorporating “digital citizenship” lessons in school curricula”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Irwin Kirsch is the highly respected Project Director for PIAAC, the OECD Programme of International Assessment of Adult Literacy. PIAAC measures adults’ proficiency in key skills such as literacy, numeracy and problem solving. In a recent interview (see link below) Kirsch says that assessments such …

“What did large scale assessments add to our understanding of adult literacy?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Welcome to the first issue of cApStAn’s new-fangled monthly newsletter. What is different about it? Of course we’ll share news about recent developments in the cApStAn ecosystem. We also intend to post snippets of information about and around the linguistics field in general, about testing …

“cApStAn April 2018 newsletter”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The challenges posed by our current fast-paced, mobile, complex and multicultural world require using increasingly diverse sets of skills. Studies such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), have shown that social and …

“Expanding the traditional focus on cognitive skills to embrace social and emotional ones”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Education and school curricula are not immune from the forces and impact of globalisation, says Oliver Stacey, the author of an interesting article in the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) blog. He adds that perhaps the most obvious example of this is the influence …

“International large-scale assessments and their impact on national school curricula”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Data from current and past tests and assessments, class room behaviour, student retention, etc., are an important resource in evaluating the quality of educational programs and services and identifying areas for improvement. An interesting article in the ACT blog looks at the results of a …

“How rapid feedback on assessments could help enhance teaching”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Automatic item generation (AIG) is one of the innovations in testing discussed at the recent Association of Test Publishers’ (ATP) annual conference in San Antonio, Texas. Multiple choice questions have been the traditional way of testing for generations; the advent of new forms of computerised …

“Automatic Item Generation in testing”

by Devasmita Ghosh – Enterprise Growth @ cApStAn//Marielle Lerner – Localization Specialist and Senior Project Manager @cApStAn The cApStAn team attended ATP’s annual conference on Innovations in Testing in the hill country outside historic San Antonio, Texas. The team was welcomed to what would be a high-energy, collaborative, jam-packed four days. There was a lot …

“ATP Innovations in Testing Conference 2018 in San Antonio”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Multiple choice questions (MQCs) have been the traditional way of testing for generations, and have not changed substantially since they were first introduced, over a century ago, by Frederick Kelly*. His “Kansas Silent Reading Test” was possibly the first (timed) reading test that could be …

“Revitalising multiple choice questions for the digital age”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village While cApStAn has collected empirical data on cross-language comparability of standardized test items, and recognises the value of standardized testing, we acknowledge that the approach described in this article is fascinating. According to the author there will always be a place for standardised testing but …

““Personalised” or standardized testing?”

by Steve Dept – cApStAn partner The year 2016 has been quite exceptional for cApStAn, but this was partly due to the fact that the bulk of the work on one of our flagship projects, linguistic quality control in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (OECD/PISA), took place in 2016, just like 2013 had …

“Taking stock of 2017, setting the bar for 2018”