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TOEFL® Family Research Program

Advancing the field of English-language learning and assessment

Innovation and Technology

Innovation in assessment design is at the heart of the TOEFL research program. The program’s researchers investigate how innovative assessment task designs and the use of technology can improve the measurement of students' language knowledge and skills.
 

Automated scoring across different modalities

Investigates whether language features developed for an automated essay-scoring system (e-rater® engine) can be used to automatically evaluate spoken responses using the SpeechRater® service.

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Helping students select appropriately challenging text: Application to a test of second language reading ability

Proposes an approach to assessing TOEFL iBT® reading passage complexity and examines the types of reading texts that language learners are expected to comprehend at different proficiency levels.  

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Automatic plagiarism detection for spoken responses in an assessment of English language proficiency

Evaluates an innovative system that can be used to automatically detect plagiarized spoken responses.  

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Monitoring the performance of human and automated scores for spoken responses

Reports the use of different statistical procedures to compare scores given by human raters with those generated by SpeechRater, an automated scoring engine for spoken responses.  

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