A Systematic Review of Test Component Ordering with Implications for Language Assessment

How to optimize ordering the parts of a language test (e.g., items, tasks, and sections) is often overlooked or assumed to be self-evident. However, ordering choices are an essential component of test design as they may impact test takers’ objective performance, perceived performance, or affective states. In this paper, we report on a systematic review of test component ordering research, focusing on 88 studies from 1933 to 2023. We provide a narrative synthesis, describing typical outcome variables (e.g., test-taker performance), independent variables (e.g., order of difficulty), and mediating variables (e.g., language proficiency). Key findings, mostly from higher educational contexts, indicate that easy-to-hard ordering may lead to better performance, though these effects are mediated by various test-taker characteristics, especially anxiety and proficiency. While section ordering by language skills is common practice in language testing, there is scant empirical support for this approach, or for organizing tests by content or format. We discuss the implications of these findings for language test developers and suggest avenues for future research, particularly the need for more studies on ordering effects in language assessment contexts.