Toxicological determinations are crucial to coroners' or medical examiners' judgments that drugs are significantly involved in a death. However, differences in laboratory procedures, thoroughness of screening, and limits of detection may result in artifactual differences in the toxicological results and the subsequent interpretations of them. To test this possibility, we conducted a toxicology ...

Although attribution theory has been applied in many fields of education as a way of understanding individual differences, it has somewhat been neglected by professionals in ELT to date. This study has thus sought to investigate the role of EFL learners’ attributions for success and failure in learning a foreign language and their performance on placement tests. Three instruments, namely, the I...

The Iranian Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology (MSRT) English Proficiency Test (EPT) has been in use since 1992. While the MSRT-EPT is generally claimed to be reliable, valid, practical, it does not assess speaking writing skills. In this exploratory study, a qualitative approach was used examine test-takers experiences language education experts’ beliefs about test as well their con...

in recent years, a number of large-scale writing assessments (e.g., toefl ibt) have employed integrated writing tests to measure test takers’ academic writing ability. using a quantitative method, the current study examined how written textual features and use of source material(s) varied across two types of text-based integrated writing tasks (i.e., listening-to-write vs. reading-to-write) and...

Most students in Japan experience a wide range of language tests in their ten-year long language-learning career. These include tests in different situations, starting with classroom tests which range from short vocabulary tests to long end of term tests. Secondly there are university entrance exams, where the stakes are high. Finally there are optional proficiency tests such as the eiken grade...

abstractwriting and speaking are the productive skills of a language and share similar components. however, there has been little attempt to investigate the impact of writing practice on the speaking proficiency of the learners. the present study using a pretest-posttest controlled group design in a quasi-experimental approach investigated the effect of guided writing practice on the speaking p...

BACKGROUND Examinations are necessary for assessment of student proficiency in medical education, but comparison of achievement across different cohorts in different tests is challenging. We applied psychometric test equating methods to compare student proficiency in two different examinations for a clinical anesthesiology course. METHODS Each examination contained 50 multiple choice items an...

L2 production of tones has been widely discussed; however, the role of orthography in the learning process has received little attention. Previous studies suggested that the opaque orthography of Chinese characters plays an important role in both L2 production and perception. The present study further investigates the role of different orthographies (Pinyin vs. Chinese characters) in L2 product...

We show that within the Chicago Public Schools, both the introduction of NCLB in 2002 and the introduction of similar district-level reforms in 1996 generated noteworthy increases in reading and math scores among students in the middle of the achievement distribution but not among the least academically advantaged students. The stringency of proficiency requirements varied among the programs im...