The National Center Test will include an English listening comprehension test in January 2006. In the exam, every examinee will individually operate an IC player and listen to English scripts via earphones. Prior to the implementation of the new test, three trial tests were held lbom 2002 to 2005. Of these tests, ‘pre-trial’ and ‘trial’ tests were conducted on high school students, and ‘Post-trial test’ was on university freshmen. This paper reports overview of the third test, ‘post-trial test’ including the results of the reading test and the listening comprehension test. In addition, effects of artificially-created aircraft noise were examined in terms of the examinees’ performance. Finally, we discuss the importance of the cooperation between fundamental and practical research, and the needs of the study on social influence upon the implementation of the high-stake test with new elements and formats.

This study examines and refines a kanji placement test using the Rasch model. The participants were international students who were studying Japanese at a college in Japan. One hundred eighty seven students took a non-revised multiple-choice kanji placement test and 176 students took a revised placement test. The results of the analysis revealed some items and distracters which did not function well in the original version, therefore the following revisions were made: 1) revision or elimination of malfunctioned items, 2) elimination of a distracter from each question, and 3) elimination of an item which had the same item difficulty as another. After revisions were carried out twice on the test, the final version was found to be more efficient than the original one, since it had less items and distracters while keeping the same reliability level as before. Items that can measure the candidates' ability properly also increased in the final version.

In increasingly common Internet on-line shopping situations, customers have no opportunity to inspect a real object and must generate the mental image of the goods they wish to purchase. Under these circumstances, the customers' feeling of satisfaction depends on their ability to generate a visual image of the object. This paper proposed a new test to measure human visual imagery ability and examined its reliability and validity through 3 studies. In Studies 1 and 2, the Visual Imagery Test(VIT) was proposed and its standardization with test-retest reliability was established. In Study 3, an attempt was made to demonstrate the relationship between a specific inner structure measured by the VIT and a daily-life imagery-related situation in order to examine the evidence of construct validity. Results showed that high test-retest reliability and some evidence of inner structural validity were attained successfully. In the future, further evidence of VIT validity should be investigated for effective use.