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The development of efficient and reliable online assessments has become increasingly important in the digital era. We developed a 10-min online word reading assessment of global English based on the existing paper-and-pencil version of our English silent word reading test. The test includes two parts, namely, random word recognition and contextual word reading. A total of 889 participants (437 children and 392 adults; 62.7% female) took part in the study. They were from various regions including mainland China, Hong Kong SAR, Macau SAR, Poland, the United States, and the Philippines. Reliability and validity analyses on various demographics samples (by age and country/region of origin) demonstrated that the WordSword Test is highly reliable and valid (e.g., the correlation of this test with other English reading measures were above.80). Education level was positively correlated with test performance, while the correlations between age and test performance were not consistent. Ninety-seven children participants also took the paper-and-pencil version of the WordSword Test. The correlation between performances on the online and paper-and-pencil versions of the test was.879, one year apart. With more children and adults taking the WordSword Test, we ultimately hope to establish norms by area, grade level, and age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Official price statistics in the Philippines are mainly sourced from the conduct of regular surveys and censuses which entail high costs. As businesses move into digital platforms, alternatives to these traditional data sources have become more available; one of which is web scraping, a process of collecting information from the web. As digital and online platforms become increasingly utilized for commerce, web scraping offers a way to increase the frequency of data collection while reducing its cost compared to price surveys. This paper provides a survey of experiences of various government statistical agencies in their conduct of web scraping for the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Moreover, it details the Philippines' experience using web scraped data to estimate the food and alcoholic beverages CPI of the National Capital Region in the Philippines, and that is compared to the official CPI estimate of the Philippine Statistics Authority. Finally, this paper discusses the challenges encountered and the recommendations for enhancing the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]