Author Archives: Alex Chapin

About Alex Chapin

Alex Chapin no longer works at Middlebury College. He is the Executive Director of Academic Technologies at UNC Charlotte. Contact him at (704) 687-0059 or achapin@gmail.com

New Version of the CATRC in development

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The Middlebury College Chinese School Computer-Adaptive Test for Reading Chinese (CATRC) was first developed by Tao-chung (Ted) Yao of the University of Hawaii using HyperCard, a Mac-based desktop application.  See:
The Computer-Adaptive Test for Reading Chinese (CATRC)

I directed the development of a new version of this exam using Macromedia Director which has been in use at Middlebury College since 2007.  This version is completely web-based, but does require the Adobe Shockwave plugin and can only be updated using Adobe Director, a complex proprietary multimedia authoring application.

New Version of CATRC

More recently I have begun development of yet another version of this valuable assessment tool, this time using widely available open source technologies including PHP, MySQL and Apache.  This new version will be much easier to deploy and update.   In addition, this new version contains an adaptive assessment algorithm user interface that can be customized for a wide range of adaptive assessment needs.