Classical automated test assembly (ATA) methods assume fixed and known coefficients for the constraints and the objective function. This hypothesis is not true for the estimates of item response theory parameters, which are crucial elements in test assembly classical models. To account for uncertainty in ATA, we propose a chance-constrained…

Understanding whether or not different types of students master various attributes can aid future learning remediation. In this study, two-level diagnostic classification models (DCMs) were developed to represent the probabilistic relationship between external latent classes and attribute mastery patterns. Furthermore, variational Bayesian (VB)…

This article is an overview of the National Assessment of Education Quality (NAEQ) of China in reading, mathematics, sciences, arts, physical education, and moral education at Grades 4 and 8. After a review of the background and history of NAEQ, we present the assessment framework with students' holistic development at the core and the design for…

International large-scale assessments of student achievement such as International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Program for International…

In this article, we discuss the effect of removing the independence assumptions between the residuals in two-level random effect models. We first consider removing the independence between the Level 2 residuals and instead assume that the vector of all residuals at the cluster level follows a general multivariate normal distribution. We…

Three issues need to be decided in the design stage of a longitudinal intervention study: the number of persons, the number of repeated measurements per person, and the duration of the study. The degree to which polynomial effects vary across persons and the drop-out pattern also influence the statistical power to detect intervention effects. This…