Reporting standard errors of equating has been advocated as a standard practice when conducting test equating. The two most widely applied procedures for standard errors of equating including the bootstrap method and the delta method are either computationally intensive or confined to the derivations of complicated formulas. In the current study,…

The frequently neglected and often misunderstood relationship between classical test theory and item response theory is discussed for the unidimensional case with binary measures and no guessing. It is pointed out that popular item response models can be directly obtained from classical test theory-based models by accounting for the discrete…

A new formula, expressing relative efficiency solely in terms of the standard errors of measurement and the frequency of distributions of true scores, is developed for the relative efficiency of two tests measuring the same trait. Subtests from the Scholastic Aptitude Test provide a numerical illustration. (Author/RC)

Numerous studies have shown increasing item reliabilities as an effect of the item position in personality scales. Traditionally, these context effects are analyzed based on item-total correlations. This approach neglects that trends in item reliabilities can be caused either by an increase in true score variance or by a decrease in error…

A test of significance for identifying individuals who are most influenced by an experimental treatment as measured by pre-post test change score is presented. The technique requires true difference scores, the reliability of obtained differences, and their standard error of measurement. (Author/JKS)

The standard error of measurement as a means for estimating the margin of error that should be allowed for in test scores is discussed. The true score measures the performance that is characteristic of the person tested; the variations, plus and minus, around the true score describe a characteristic of the test. When the standard deviation is used…

No test, however well designed, can measure a student's true achievement because numerous factors interfere with the ability to measure achievement. These factors are sources of measurement error, and the goal in creating tests is to have as little measurement error as possible. Error can result from the test design, factors related to individual…

Demonstrating good reliability for the difference score in measurement, the results of this study indicate that the difference score is often highly reliable when the correlation between true change and true initial status is nonnegative. In general, when individual differences in true change are appreciable, the difference score shows strong…

Discusses four ubiquitous major sources of measurement error for individual intelligence scales. Argues that where these sources cannot be directly investigated, they should be estimated rather than ignored. Estimated the typical magnitude of error arising from each of content sampling, time sampling, scoring, and administration. (Author)

Five-hundred dichotomously scored response patterns were generated with sequentially independent (SI) items and 500 with dependent (SD) items for each of thirty-six combinations of sampling parameters (i.e., three test lengths, three sample sizes, and four item difficulty distributions). KR-20, KR-21, and Split-Half (S-H) reliabilities were…

The concept of a behavior domain is a reasonable and essential foundation for psychometric work based on true score theory, the linear model of common factor analysis, and the nonlinear models of item response theory. Investigators applying these models to test data generally treat the true scores or factors or traits as abstractive psychological…

Rules, procedures, and algorithms intended to aid researchers and practitioners in the application of generalizability theory to a broad range of measurement problems are presented. Two examples of measurement research are G studies, which examine the dependability of some general measurement procedure; and D studies, which provide the data for…

The gain, or difference, score is defined as the difference between the posttest score and the pretest score for an individual. Gain scores appear to be a natural measure of growth for education and the social sciences, but they contain two sources of measurement error, error in either the pretest or posttest scores, and cannot be considered…

The four main approaches to measuring treatment effects in schools; raw gain, residual gain, covariance, and true scores; were compared. A simulation study showed true score analysis produced a large number of Type-I errors. When corrected for this error, this method showed the least power of the four. This outcome was clearly the result of the…