The author proposes a greater professional association role in establishing standards for quality assurance in testing. He presents his views as a test developer who dislikes the legal model for resolving professional issues. The use of publications and informational activities to make people aware of the professional standards and how they can be…

Described are procedures followed in developing, administering, and scoring a set of mathematical problem-solving superitems and examining their construct validity through a recently developed evaluation technique associated with a taxonomy of the structure of learned outcomes. Data strongly support the validity of the underlying theoretical…

One means of learning about the processes operating in a multiple choice test is to include some test items, called nonsense items, which have no correct answer. This paper compares two versions of a mathematical model of test performance to interpret test data that includes both genuine and nonsense items. One formula is based on the usual…

The symposium, "Taming the Rasch Tiger: Using Item Response Theory in Practical Educational Measurement," was organized to deemphasize the technical complexities of item response theory (IRT) and to show the audience how IRT can be used in practical educational measurement. Four papers from the symposium are summarized and comments are…

One of the important underlying assumptions of all item response theory (IRT) models is that of local independence. This assumption requires that the response to an item on a test not be influenced by the response to any other items. This assumption is often taken for granted, with little or no scrutiny of the response process required to answer…

This report presents an analysis of the content validity of a series of secondary school mathematics tests designed by university mathematicians in California to help improve the articulation between secondary and postsecondary mathematics instruction. The purpose in conducting this analysis was to improve understanding of what it means to…

A sample of 234 fifth- and 259 sixth-grade students scaled the items of the Piers-Harris, Tennessee, Coopersmith, and Lipsett self-concept measures. The scaling of the Piers-Harris and the Tennessee inventories was examined in reference to their subscales. The present technique placed items on a bivariate plane of two orthogonal dimensions…

To assess the effects of correlated abilities on test characteristics, and to explore the effects of correlated abilities on the use of a multidimensional item response theory model which does not explicitly account for such a correlation, two tests were constructed. One had two relatively unidimensional subsets of items, the other had all…

Several techniques have been developed for creating continuous smooth distributions of test norms. This paper describes two studies that explore the behavior of cubic splines in order to determine their appropriateness for use in test norming. The first study uses data from the Curriculum Referenced Tests of Mastery (CRTM) and employs two…

This study used classical psychometric, latent trait, and nonparametric approaches to analyze 13- and 14-item scales of English language proficiency. Tests of English listening comprehension (dictation) and reading ("copytest") were constructed by modifying the standard dictation testing procedure to create items of text segments which…

For many years personalization of achievement testing has been impossible in all but the simplest forms. Recently, item response theory (IRT), or latent trait theory, has emerged as a valuable tool which brings far greater flexibility to the process than had previously been possible. The single parameter Rasch Model, a mathematical model developed…

This study assumes that multiple choice test items generally provide the testee with several solutions, one of which is correct and the others of which are wrong. If pupils are unable to answer a question, one would expect that the wrong choices have equal chances of being selected. In many multiple choice items on stoichiometric calculation which…

This paper presents an introduction to the use of latent trait models for the estimation of domain scores. It was shown that these models provided an advantage over classical test theory and binomial error models in that unbiased estimates of true domain scores could be obtained even when items were not randomly selected from a universe of items.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of using multidimensional items in a computer adaptive test (CAT) setting which assumes a unidimensional item response theory (IRT) framework. Previous research has suggested that the composite of multidimensional abilities being estimated by a unidimensional IRT model is not constant…

During 1975-1979 this research into the potential of computerized adaptive testing to reduce errors in the measurement of human capabilities used Marine recruits for a live-testing validity comparison of computerized adaptive and conventional tests. The program purposes were to: (1) identify the most useful computer-based adaptive testing…