Evidence of stable standard setting results over panels or occasions is an important part of the validity argument for an established cut score. Unfortunately, due to the high cost of convening multiple panels of content experts, standards often are based on the recommendation from a single panel of judges. This approach implicitly assumes that…

In recent years, demand for performance assessments has continued to grow. However, performance assessments are notorious for lower reliability, and in particular, low reliability resulting from task specificity. Since reliability analyses typically treat the performance tasks as randomly sampled from an infinite universe of tasks, these estimates…

Prior research indicates that the overall reliability of performance ratings can be improved by using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to adjust for rater effects. The present investigation extends previous work by evaluating the impact of OLS adjustment on standard errors of measurement ("SEM") at specific score levels. In…

The use of standardized patients to assess communication skills is now an essential part of assessing a physician's readiness for practice. To improve the reliability of communication scores, it has become increasingly common in recent years to use statistical models to adjust ratings provided by standardized patients. This study employed ordinary…

The present study examined the long-term usefulness of estimated parameters used to adjust the scores from a performance assessment to account for differences in rater stringency. Ratings from four components of the USMLE[R] Step 2 Clinical Skills Examination data were analyzed. A generalizability-theory framework was used to examine the extent to…

Numerous studies have compared the Angoff standard-setting procedure to other standard-setting methods, but relatively few studies have evaluated the procedure based on internal criteria. This study uses a generalizability theory framework to evaluate the stability of the estimated cut score. To provide a measure of internal consistency, this…

Although multivariate generalizability theory was developed more than 30 years ago, little published research utilizing this framework exists and most of what does exist examines tests built from tables of specifications. In this context, it is assumed that the universe scores from levels of the fixed multivariate facet will be correlated, but the…