White Papers

1. A study of the use of e-Assessment by Professional Bodies

FreshMinds, commissioned by Pearson VUE, has undertaken a comprehensive study of the UK e-Assessment market, its size and dynamics with a particular focus on Professional Bodies and their use of computer-based testing (CBT).

1. Practice Effects and Program Features in Professional Regulatory Examinations

Candidates who retake examinations have been found to achieve higher scores. For candidates who retake an examination due to a previous failure attempt, their chance of passing may be greater simply because they have practice taking the examination...

2. Finding a Needle in a Haystack: Detecting Item Disclosure in Large-Scale Testing Programs

With the proliferation of and easy access to information via the internet, item disclosure is becoming more of a threat to large-scale high-stakes testing programs. To date some researchers have used item parameter drift detection strategies to identify potentially disclosed items...

3. Optimizing Item Pool Characteristics to Control Item Exposure in a computerized Adaptive Test

We examined the relationship between item pool characteristics (pool size and item difficulty distribution) and item exposure rates in a Rasch model-based variable-length fixed standard error of measurement computerized adaptive test...

4. Investigating Displacement in the Winsteps Rasch Calibration Application

Item drift analyses that use displacement have reported displacement distributions symmetrically distributed around zero (Jones and Smith, 2006). Approximately equal numbers of items appear to drift in both a positive (harder) and a negative (easier) direction...