Since Cronbach's (1951) elaboration of a from its introduction by Guttman (1945), this coefficient has become ubiquitous in characterizing assessment instruments in education, psychology, and other social sciences. Also ubiquitous are caveats on the calculation and interpretation of this coefficient. This article summarizes a recent contribution…

This paper introduces five commonly used approaches to analyzing multiple-choice test data. They are classical test theory, factor analysis, cluster analysis, item response theory, and model analysis. Brief descriptions of the goals and algorithms of these approaches are provided, together with examples illustrating their applications in physics…

The concept of a behavior domain is a reasonable and essential foundation for psychometric work based on true score theory, the linear model of common factor analysis, and the nonlinear models of item response theory. Investigators applying these models to test data generally treat the true scores or factors or traits as abstractive psychological…