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Over the last five years, tremendous strides have been made in advancing the AIG methodology required to produce items in diverse content areas. However, the one content area where enormous problems remain unsolved is language arts, generally, and reading comprehension, more specifically. While reading comprehension test items can be created using many different item formats, fill-in-the-blank remains one of the most common when the goal is to measure inferential knowledge. Currently, the item development process used to create fill-in-the-blank reading comprehension items is time-consuming and expensive. Hence, the purpose of the study is to introduce a new systematic method for generating fill-in-the-blank reading comprehension items using an item modeling approach. We describe the use of different unsupervised learning methods that can be paired with natural language processing techniques to identify the salient item models within existing texts. To demonstrate the capacity of our method, 1,013 test items were generated from 100 input texts taken from fill-in-the-blank reading comprehension items used on a high-stakes college entrance exam in South Korea. Our validation results indicated that the generated items produced higher semantic similarities between the item options while depicting little to no syntactic differences with the traditionally written test items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present study is to explore cross-cultural differences among teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) on the basic language constructs and the impacts on their perceived teaching ability in English-reading instruction. Chinese EFL (n = 73) and Korean EFL (n = 39) teachers were administered the Reading Teacher Knowledge Survey for testing their implicit and explicit knowledge on phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, phonics, and morphological awareness; and their self-perceived teaching ability on teaching typical readers, struggling readers, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Results showed that both Chinese EFL and Korean EFL teachers' knowledge on the phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, and phonics was implicit rather than explicit. However, the teachers' knowledge on morphological awareness showed cross-cultural difference: Chinese EFL teachers had greater explicit knowledge on morphological awareness than implicit knowledge, while their Korean EFL counterparts showed opposite pattern. Self-perceived teaching ability was also distinct cross-culturally, in that Chinese EFL teachers were only confident in teaching English vocabulary, whereas Korean EFL teachers had generally positive self-perception on teaching typical readers, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Importantly, both groups of EFL teachers' explicit knowledge on the basic language constructs explained additional variance for predicting their self-perception on teaching English reading, controlling for the effects of their years of teaching and implicit knowledge. Educational implications and future research ideas are discussed in relation to the cross-cultural differences of teacher knowledge and their perceived teaching ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated the extent to which presence of visual cues had an impact on test-takers' use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies during an L2 listening test. A total of 116 high school students in South Korea were randomly allocated to take either audio-only or video-based listening comprehension test consisting of 15 items. Immediately after the test was finished, the participants responded to a questionnaire to report the degree to which they used various cognitive and metacognitive test-taking strategies. Findings showed that there was no significant difference in the use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies between the two groups, but the video group outperformed the audio-only group in terms of test scores achieved. Factor analysis was conducted on the responses to the questionnaire. Three cognitive and metacognitive factors were identified (planning, comprehending and retrieval, monitoring and evaluation). When these factors were fitted in linear regressions, results showed that 'planning' and 'comprehending and retrieval' factors had significant positive effects on the overall test score, while the 'monitoring and evaluation' factor had a significant negative effect on the test-takers' performance. Implications of the findings were discussed with reference to the design of video-based listening test to simulate authentic listening experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Korean high school students (Experiment 1) and college students (Experiment 2a) received a 16-minute lesson on Antarctica that consisted of English audio only (audio group) or English audio with corresponding video depicting the scenes and objects described in the audio (audio + video group). The audio + video group scored significantly (d = 0.33 in Experiment 1) or marginally higher (d = 0.42 in Experiment 2a) than the audio group on a subsequent comprehension test. The mean difficulty rating of the audio + video group was significantly less than that of the audio group (d = 0.62 in Experiment 1 and d = 0.96 in Experiment 2a); the mean effort rating of the audio + video group was significantly greater than that of the audio group (d = 0.60 in Experiment 1 and d = 0.79 in Experiment 2a). When the audio was in Korean, comprehension scores of college students did not benefit from added video (d = −0.03 in Experiment 2b). Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined and compared students' understanding of nature of science (NOS) with 521 Grade 8 Canadian and Korean students using a mixed methods approach. The concepts of NOS were measured using a survey that had both quantitative and qualitative elements. Descriptive statistics and one-way multivariate analysis of variances examined the quantitative data while a conceptually clustered matrix classified the open-ended responses. The country effect could explain 3-12 % of the variances of subjectivity, empirical testability and diverse methods, but it was not significant for the concepts of tentativeness and socio-cultural embeddedness of science. The open-ended responses showed that students believed scientific theories change due to errors or discoveries. Students regarded empirical evidence as undeniable and objective although they acknowledged experiments depend on theories or scientists' knowledge. The open responses revealed that national situations and curriculum content affected their views. For our future democratic citizens to gain scientific literacy, science curricula should include currently acknowledged NOS concepts and should be situated within societal and cultural perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]