Introduction: Item response theory (IRT) has received much attention in validation of assessment instrument because it allows the estimation of students' ability from any set of the items. Item response theory allows the difficulty and discrimination levels of each item on the test to be estimated. In the framework of IRT, item characteristics are…

This article builds upon a proiminent definition of construct validity that focuses on variation in attributes causing variation in measurement outcomes. This article synthesizes the defintion and uses Rasch measurement modeling to explicate a modified conceptualization of construct validity for assessments of developmental attributes. If…

Full-information item analysis provides item developers and reviewers comprehensive empirical evidence of item quality, including option response frequency, point-biserial index (PBI) for distractors, mean-scores of respondents selecting each option, and option trace lines. The multi-serial index (MSI) is introduced as a more informative…

Identification and further motivation of gifted students are widely discussed among the science education community. In the context of the educational system of the Czech Republic, competitions serve as one of the main ways to identify those gifted in precollege education. In this article, we report the foundation of a team-based open-book…

Assessment is a key lever for educational improvement. Assessments can be used to monitor, signal, and influence science teaching and learning -- provided that they are of high quality, reflect the rigor and intent of academic standards, and elicit meaningful student performances. Since the release of "A Framework for K-12 Science…

This is a descriptive study which intends to determine whether the difficulty and discrimination indices of the multiple-choice questions show differences according to cognitive levels of the Bloom's Taxonomy, which are used in the exams of the courses in a business administration bachelor's degree program offered through open and distance…

Chemistry faculty members are highly skilled in obtaining, analyzing, and interpreting physical measurements, but often they are less skilled in measuring student learning. This work provides guidance for chemistry faculty from the research literature on multiple-choice item development in chemistry. Areas covered include content, stem, and…

The rationale for the introduction of standards in the United States in the late 1980s was that the quality of education would improve. Assessment instruments in the form of written tests were constructed in order to perform a monitoring function. The introduction of standards and the associated monitoring have been replicated in South Africa. It…

A directly applicable latent variable modeling procedure for classical item analysis is outlined. The method allows one to point and interval estimate item difficulty, item correlations, and item-total correlations for composites consisting of categorical items. The approach is readily employed in empirical research and as a by-product permits…

The popularity of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) is increasing rapidly. In order to make learning environments more efficient, researchers have been exploring the possibility of an automatic adaptation of the learning environment to the learner or the context. One of the possible adaptation techniques is adaptive item sequencing by matching…

The purpose of this study was to develop general outcome measures (GOM) in mathematics so that teachers could focus their instruction on needed prerequisite skills. We describe in detail, the manner in which content-related evidence was established and then present a number of statistical analyses conducted to evaluate the technical adequacy of…

It is shown that in the context of the Model with Internal Restrictions on the Item Difficulties (MIRID), different componential theories about an item set may lead to equivalent models. Furthermore, we provide conditions for the identifiability of the MIRID model parameters, and it will be shown how the MIRID model relates to the Linear Logistic…

When norm-referenced tests are developed for instructional purposes, to assess the effects of educational programs, or for educational research purposes, it can be very important to conduct item and test analyses. These analyses can evaluate the quality of items and of the test as a whole. Such analyses can also be employed to revise and improve…

This computer program, written in BASIC, performs three different calculations of test reliability: (1) the Kuder-Richardson method; (2); the "common split-half" method; and (3) the Rulon-Guttman split-half method. The program reads sequential access data files for microcomputers that have been set up by statistical packages such as…

Test development included designing, screening, and field testing of test items; compilation into an examination administered to a target group; and norm development for score comparison with a national sample. (MSE)