In 2010, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's Education Program has established the Deeper Learning Initiative, which focuses on students' development of deeper learning skills (i.e., the mastery of core academic content, critical-thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, communication, and "learn-how-to-learn" skills). Two test…

The purpose of this study was to examine the homogeneity in difficulty of item domains and the effectiveness of Rasch pre-equating procedures for adjusting test scores for differences in the difficulty of tests constructed by sampling from item domains. The data used were taken from a field test and calibration of 810 tenth-grade items in…

Unidimensional item response theory (IRT) is widely used in the analysis and equating of educational achievement tests. If an IRT model is true, item response must be locally independent when the trait is held constant. Several measures of local dependence which are used in conjunction with the three-parameter logistic model in the analysis of…

The purpose of this pilot study was to investigate the relationship between achievement, teacher-reported letter grades, and instructional levels in a sample of 100 Chapter 1 students who had participated in the program for two years. For each student, third grade and fifth grade California Achievement Test scores, end-of-year letter grades, and…

College teachers often use norm-referenced classroom tests which are too easy for distinguishing adequately among levels of student achievement, yet they are reluctant to adopt more difficult tests. We explored the basis for current practices concerning test difficulty through informal interviews and questionnaires completed by faculty members and…

A multiple choice achievement test was constructed in which both cognitive level and degree of abstractness were controlled. Subjects were 75 students from a major university in the Southwest. A group of 13 judges, also university students, classified the concepts for degree of abstractness. Results indicated that both cognitive level and degree…

Studies carried out over a 12-year period addressed fundamental questions on the use of Rasch-based item banks. Large field tests administered in grades 3-8 of reading, mathematics, and science items, as well as standardized test results were used to explore the possible effects of many factors on item calibrations. In general, the results…

In 1983, four screening tests for assigning students to the appropriate levels of the Stanford Achievement Test, Seventh Edition, were developed with a national sample of hearing impaired students. While students are normally assigned to one of six test level booklets according to grade, this is inappropriate for certain students. This paper…

The problem of measuring growth across the target grade and, typically, the two adjacent grades, concerns most developers of standardized, norm-referenced achievement tests, particularly at the item selection stage. Opinion is divided on whether to retain or drop items that do not get easier from grade to grade. The controversy has focused on…

This paper argues that no single measurement strategy serves all purposes and that applying methods and techniques which allow a variety of data elements to be retrieved and juxtaposed may be an investment in the future. Item response theory, Rasch model, and latent trait theory are all approaches to a single conceptual topic. An abbreviated look…

Test scores were compared for two types of objective achievement tests--multiple choice tests and the recently developed Multi-Digit Test (MDT) procedure. MDT is an approximation of the fill-in-the-blank technique. Students select their answers from long lists of alphabetized terms, with each answer corresponding to a number from 001 to 999. The…

The stability of Rasch test item difficulty parameters was investigated under varying conditions. Data were taken from a mathematics achievement test administered to over 2,000 Australian students. The experiments included: (1) relative stability of the Rasch, traditional, and z-item difficulty parameters using different sample sizes and designs;…

Greater knowledge about the practical application of Rasch technology can help in avoiding misapplications and confusions in testing programs. Equal interval curriculum-based scaling makes possible the following improvements in measuring basic skills achievement by enabling testing programs to: (1) individualize the difficulty level of…