For assessment scales applied to different groups (e.g., students from different states; patients in different countries), multigroup differential item functioning (MG-DIF) needs to be evaluated in order to ensure that respondents with the same trait level but from different groups have equal response probabilities on a particular item. The…

This paper drills deeper into the documented effects of the Cognitive Tutor Algebra I and ASSISTments intelligent tutoring systems by estimating their effects on specific problems. We start by describing a multilevel Rasch-type model that facilitates testing for differences in the effects between problems and precise problem-specific effect…

The selection of an appropriate booklet design is an important element of large-scale assessments of student achievement. Two design properties that are typically optimized are the "balance" with respect to the positions the items are presented and with respect to the mutual occurrence of pairs of items in the same booklet. The purpose…

The current study applied the person-fit statistic, l[subscript z], to data from a Canadian provincial achievement test to explore the usefulness of conducting person-fit analysis on large-scale assessments. Item parameter estimates were compared before and after the misfitting student responses, as identified by l[subscript z], were removed. The…

Background: While rotated test booklets have been employed in large-scale assessments to increase the content coverage of the assessments, rotation has not yet been applied to the context questionnaires administered to respondents. Methods: This paper describes the development of a methodology that uses rotated context questionnaires in…

In the social sciences, latent traits often have a hierarchical structure, and data can be sampled from multiple levels. Both hierarchical latent traits and multilevel data can occur simultaneously. In this study, we developed a general class of item response theory models to accommodate both hierarchical latent traits and multilevel data. The…