They are joined by 19-year-old Katie Hoff, an individual medley specialist who will also try to make the team in the 100-, 200-, 400- and 800-meter freestyles, a range of proficiency rarely seen since Shirley Babashoff in the 1970s, and Ryan Lochte, a Floridian who feels a spiritual connection to the water and to the rapper Lil Wayne, and will challenge Phelps in both individual medley events.
Finally, the lack of the differences in test scores between the modes may be attributed to the limited range of proficiency of the participants.
The students were recruited from different departments at Renmin University of China, so as to cover a wide range of proficiency levels since students are admitted by different departments in terms of their scores of College Entrance Exam (Gaokao).
These results revealed that high scoring test-takers were able to select the correct answer choice, and the VELC Test® items were targeted for a wide range of proficiency levels.
While our proficiency-stratified sampling was reasonably successful in recruiting learners of a wide range of proficiency (score range = 18 95 in the TOEFL iBT; see descriptive statistics in Table 5), we were not able to include advanced learners who had obtained TOEFL iBT scores of more than 95.
This group was composed of adult Japanese learners of English, including 13 undergraduate and 10 graduate students, 6 English teachers, and 1 professional who used English for business, with a wide range of proficiency from beginning to advanced levels; their initial Criterion® holistic scores ranged from 1 to 6 (the whole score range).
In fact, construct coverage is a major challenge that researchers in L2 pragmatics assessment face, along with issues regarding test practicality, coping with examinees with a wide range of proficiency, and linking test scores to real-world implications (Taguchi and Roever 2017).
During this stage, 36 TEM student scripts were first prepared, representing a range of proficiency levels (see Appendix 2), and then the 35 teachers were asked to read the scripts and complete the "can do" questionnaire (one for each script; see Appendix 3); that is, they were required to judge to what extent a student writer was competent with reference to the descriptors in the questionnaire.
In addition, we tested participants with a range of proficiency with Kanji as we hypothesized that the functional connectivity for Kanji may be affected by one's proficiency.
