In this essay, the author tries to look forward into the 21st century to divine three things: (i) What skills will researchers in the future need to solve the most pressing problems? (ii) What are some of the most likely candidates to be those problems? and (iii) What are some current areas of research that seem mined out and should not distract…

Suggests that because of the nonlinear relationship between item usage and item security, the problems of test security posed by continuous administration of standardized tests cannot be resolved merely by increasing the size of the item pool. Offers alternative strategies to overcome these problems, distributing test items so as to avoid the…

The testlet, a bundle of test items, alleviates some problems associated with computerized adaptive testing: context effects, lack of robustness, and item difficulty ordering. While testlets may be linear or hierarchical, the most useful ones are four-level hierarchical units, containing 15 items and partitioning examinees into 16 classes. (GDC)