After moving away from the psychometric and the integrative language testing paradigms toward the communicative language testing paradigm, experts in writing and assessment have been concerned with creating conditions under which learners can experience and display writing in an authentic way so that their writings will tally the ones in non-test situations. As an alternative assessment option,...

This article discusses the academic writing challenges of undergraduate students at Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), South Africa. It examines challenges such as lack of a mastery of academic writing conventions, analysis of writing topics, using writing to construct social identities; ability to research and apply knowledge across different context and poor sentence skills. It a...

The alignment of the CEFR framework in Malaysian English curriculum has significantly changed classroom teaching and learning. new shifted from emphasising centralised exams to measuring learning progress; hence, formative assessment was introduced. Previous research highlighted a substantial gap between secondary school teachers' understanding actual practises classroom. also found that writin...

Much of the focus on learning technologies has been on structuring innovative learning experiences and on managing distance and hybrid learning environments. This article focuses on the use of technology as an important formative assessment and feedback tool. The rationale for this focus is based on prior research findings that suggest that timely and informative feedback promotes learning. The...

This research aims to develop a multiple-choice Web-based quiz-game-like formative assessment system, named GAM-WATA. The unique design of ‘Ask-Hint Strategy’ turns the Web-based formative assessment into an online quiz game. ‘Ask-Hint Strategy’ is composed of ‘Prune Strategy’ and ‘Call-in Strategy’. ‘Prune Strategy’ removes one incorrect option and turns the original 4-option item into a 3-opt...

A description is given of the CAPTEAP system that generates English proficiency tests (EPTs) automatically. Because the work is targeted at non-native, graduate students who need to develop technical writing skills, CAPTEAP tests the student's ability to understand and produce technical writing in English, also helping him/her develop the schemata for the academic discourse. For this reason the...

Formative, content-level feedback on student writing has been shown to have positive impacts on both writing and learning outcomes. However, many teachers struggle to provide this type of feedback to large classrooms of students. This paper takes an initial step towards supporting teacher-facilitated feedback through the use of automated and user-directed topic discovery. 114 student essays wer...

Writing high-quality test questions is not an easy task. This report offers a brief summary of how to write more effective multiple choice questions and reasoning questions based on the principles of adult learning theory. The intent of this article is to present a brief overview of information for readers at a formative level who are interested in basic question-writing tips.