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 purpose of the present studies was to test the hypothesis that the psychometric characteristics of ability scales may be significantly distorted if one accounts for emotional factors during test taking. Specifically, the present studies evaluate the effects of anxiety and motivation on the item difficulties of the Rasch model. In Study 1, the…

This exploratory study investigated potential sources of setting accommodation resulting in differential item functioning (DIF) on math and reading assessments for examinees with varied learning characteristics. The examinees were those who participated in large-scale assessments and were tested in either standardized or accommodated testing…

Although a substantial amount of research has been conducted on differential item functioning in testing, studies have focused on detecting differential item functioning rather than on explaining how or why it may occur. Some recent work has explored sources of differential functioning using explanatory and multilevel item response models. This…

In traditional studies on value-added indicators of educational effectiveness, students are usually treated as belonging to those schools where they took their final examination. However, in practice, students sometimes attend multiple schools and therefore it is questionable whether this assumption of belonging to the last school they attended…

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…