Category Archives: Tests and Assessments

The Wondrous Adaptation Cycle of a PISA2018 Questionnaire Item (and Subsequent Evolutions) Speaker: Shinoh Lee, Survey Localisation Manager at cApStAn LQC Contributor: Elica Krajçeva, Survey Localisation Manager at cApStAn LQC Recorded on 09.03.2021 | Duration: 20 minutes Sophisticated translation designs have become the norm in high-stakes tests and are essential in order to collect comparable …

“The Wondrous Adaptation Cycle of a PISA2018 Questionnaire Item (and Subsequent Evolutions)”

Re-edited by Andrea Ferrari, Co-founder at cApStAn, from a presentation made at CSDI Washington 2012 by Steve Dept, Andrea Ferrari and Juliette Mendelovits The design of major international comparative studies such as OECD’s PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) or IEA’S TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) includes a Field Trial (FT) phase …

“The Role of Linguistic Quality Assurance after Field Trialling”

An assessment is designed within a given cultural environment. If you plan to administer the test in regions with different cultural backgrounds, how do you evaluate the cultural divide? Try a cultural review, even if the test is to be delivered in English only but, say, in the UAE or in South Africa. Culture may …

“Suitability, Portability and Sensitivity – What a Cultural Review will Tell You about Your Assessment”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The IEA’s Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is a series of international assessments of the mathematics and science knowledge of students around the world, administered every four years. TIMSS 2019 was conducted in 64 countries and 8 benchmarking systems. The outcomes of …

“The translation and adaptation journey of a TIMSS grade 8 science item”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village How do you define “translation quality”? How can it be measured? In a recent live webinar cApStAn’s CEO Steve Dept explained how “intervention categories” used in a translation verification process can help report on translation quality in a standardized way and generate meaningful statistics. Translation …

“What are “intervention categories” and how can revisers use them to improve translation quality?”

by Andrea Ferrari – Senior Associate In international surveys in general and in comparative assessments in particular, investigators are interested in collecting data about knowledge, skills and competences of a given population at a given point in time. In addition, if periodical data collections are planned, it is of great interest to also measure change …

“Trend Measurement in International Assessment Surveys”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village A patent filing by Swiss pharma company IBSA (Institut Biochimique S.A.) has been rejected in a US Court ruling which found that the certified English translation of the Italian term semiliquido was “indefinite”, as the English term “half-liquid” could be construed as several things. This …

“Rejection of patent filing could have been avoided with a translatablity assessment”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “Edutopia Online” is produced by the George Lucas Education Foundation (GLEF), a nonprofit organization that documents and disseminates stories about best practices in K-12 public education. Edutopia has reviewed hundreds of educational studies carried out in 2020 and singled out 10 to be the most …

“Edutopia’s review of top 10 education studies in 2020 covers topics from virtual learning and racial bias in grading to impact of air pollution”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, turned 20 on January 15. With its 55 milion articles in 300 languages it is the 13th most visited page on the web. Wikipedia entries are generally in the forefront of preliminary web research on almost any topic. The very feature …

“Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary revives debate about its reliability and the need for critical thinking skills in students”

by Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO Readers of this informative series on good practice in test translation are aware that the Chaos Management Skills Assessment is a fictitious project, which we set up for the exclusive purpose of the series. The purpose is to illustrate the complexity of test translation and the added value of a …

“The Chaos Management Skills Assessment Series: A Test Translation Case Study Episode 4 – Linguistic Quality Assurance and Optical Check”

by Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO By now, readers of this informative series on good practice in test translation are aware that the Chaos Management Skills Assessment is a fictitious project, which we set up for the exclusive purpose of the series. The purpose is to illustrate the complexity of test translation and the added value …

“The Chaos Management Skills Assessment Series: A Test Translation Case Study Episode 3 – Translation Technology and Support to translators”

by Kristin Bernor, Questionmark and Steve Dept, cApStAn It takes more than a good translation provider and a good platform to ensure that an assessment can reliably measure cognitive and non-cognitive skills across languages and cultures. Of course, most sophisticated testing environments support multiple languages, but they may fail to enable workflows that harness the …

“Best Practices for Adapting and Translating Computerized Tests and Exams in the 21st Century”