David Thissen, a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Quantitative Program at the University of North Carolina, has consulted and served on technical advisory committees for assessment programs that use item response theory (IRT) over the past couple decades. He has come to the conclusion that there are usually two purposes…

The purpose of this article is to review applications of reliability formulas and to recommend more appropriate methods of determining the reliability of affective instruments. (SK)

Cloze-based evaluations of reading comprehension present room for a greater amount of subjectivity in rating reader response. A study was designed to ascertain the nature of potential subjectivity within a single-rater's ratings of cloze-based assessments of reading comprehension. (DF)

Upon learning that a form of the Sequential Tests of Educational Progress was incorrectly distributed to an unidentified number of high school students along with an answer sheet pregridded with an alternate test form, the Austin Independent School District performed the following research analyses: (1) scored the tests using the key for each…

With the increasing globalization of human resources practices, a commensurate increase in demand has occurred for multi-language ("global") personality norms for use in selection and development efforts. The combination of data from multiple translations of a personality assessment into a single norm engenders error from multiple sources. This…

This study is an attempt at a cohesive characterization of the concept of essay reliability. As such, it takes as a basic premise that previous and current practices in reporting reliability estimates for essay tests have certain shortcomings. The study provides an analysis of these shortcomings--partly to encourage a fuller understanding of the…

If a loss function is available specifying the social cost of an error of measurement in the score on a unidimensional test, an asymptotic method, based on item response theory, is developed for optimal test design for a specified target population of examinees. Since in the real world such loss functions are not available, it is more useful to…

Previous studies of test item bias have investigated how different groups of examinees perform differently on a given set of items. These studies imply that examinees should be treated in a certain way because they are of a particular sex or race rather than as individuals in their own right, but it is unrealistic and unfair to assume such an…

This study explores the use of the modified caution index (MCI) for identifying judges whose patterns of recommendations suggest that their judgments might be based on incomplete information, flawed reasoning, or inattention to their standard-setting tasks. It also examines the effect on test standards and passing rates when the test standards of…

Forming a sequence covering the various aspects of the simplex model, four articles are presented here under the following titles: "A Simplex Model for Analyzing Academic Growth", "Analyzing Ratings With Correlated Intrajudge Measurement Errors", "The Correlation of States With Gain", and "The Reliability of…