Constructed response (CR) items are widely used in large-scale testing programs, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and many district and state-level assessments in the United States. One unique feature of CR items is that they depend on human raters to assess the quality of examinees' work. The judgment of human…

Linking score scales across different tests is considered speculative and fraught, even at the aggregate level (Feuer et al., 1999; Thissen, 2007). We introduce and illustrate validation methods for aggregate linkages, using the challenge of linking U.S. school district average test scores across states as a motivating example. We show that…

Trend estimation in international comparative large-scale assessments relies on measurement invariance between countries. However, cross-national differential item functioning (DIF) has been repeatedly documented. We ran a simulation study using national item parameters, which required trends to be computed separately for each country, to compare…

Full account of the latent regression model for the National Assessment of Educational Progress is given. The treatment includes derivation of the EM algorithm, Newton-Raphson method, and the asymptotic standard errors. The paper also features the use of the adaptive Gauss-Hermite numerical integration method as a basic tool to evaluate…