The study covers the development and testing of the alternative mechanics survey (AMS), a modified force concept inventory (FCI), which used automatically marked free-response questions. Data were collected over a period of three academic years from 611 participants who were taking physics classes at high school and university level. A total of…

To mitigate the potential damaging consequences of rapid guessing (RG), a form of noneffortful responding, researchers have proposed a number of scoring approaches. The present simulation study examines the robustness of the most popular of these approaches, the unidimensional effort-moderated (EM) scoring procedure, to multidimensional RG (i.e.,…

Purpose: Item response theory (IRT) is a modern psychometric framework with several advantageous properties as compared with classical test theory. IRT has been successfully used to model performance on anomia tests in individuals with aphasia; however, all efforts to date have focused on noun production accuracy. The purpose of this study is to…

Topic models are mathematical and statistical models used to analyze textual data. The objective of topic models is to gain information about the latent semantic space of a set of related textual data. The semantic space of a set of textual data contains the relationship between documents and words and how they are used. Topic models are becoming…

The Fundamental Concepts for Organic Reaction Mechanisms Inventory (FC-ORMI) is a concept inventory with most items in a two-tier design in which an answer tier is followed by a reasoning tier. Statistical results provided strong evidence for the validity and reliability of the data obtained using the FC-ORMI. In this study, differential item…

Forced-choice questionnaires can prevent faking and other response biases typically associated with rating scales. However, the derived trait scores are often unreliable and ipsative, making interindividual comparisons in high-stakes situations impossible. Several studies suggest that these problems vanish if the number of measured traits is high.…

Many high-stakes examinations in the United Kingdom (UK) use both constructed-response items and selected-response items. We need to evaluate the inter-rater reliability for constructed-response items that are scored by humans. While there are a variety of methods for evaluating rater consistency across ratings in the psychometric literature, we…

KR-21 reliability and its extension (coefficient [alpha]) gives the reliability estimate of test scores under the assumption of tau-equivalent forms. KR-21 reliability gives the reliability estimate for summed scores for dichotomous items when items are randomly sampled from an infinite pool of similar items (randomly parallel forms). The article…

This study aimed to propose a new method for scoring C-Tests as measures of general language proficiency. In this approach, the unit of analysis is sentences rather than gaps or passages. That is, the gaps correctly reformulated in each sentence were aggregated as sentence score, and then each sentence was entered into the analysis as a polytomous…

Trend scoring is often used in large-scale assessments to monitor for rater drift when the same constructed response items are administered in multiple test administrations. In trend scoring, a set of responses from Time "A" are rescored by raters at Time "B." The purpose of this study is to examine the ability of…

The present study has aimed to develop and validate a protein concept inventory (PCI) consisting of 25 multiple-choice (MC) questions to assess students' understanding of protein, which is a fundamental concept across different biology disciplines. The development process of the PCI involved a literature review to identify protein-related content,…

Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (Raven 1941) is a widely used 60-item long measure of general mental ability. It was recently suggested that, for situations where taking this test is too time consuming, a shorter version, comprised of only the last series of the Standard Progressive Matrices (Myszkowski and Storme 2018) could be used, while…

Many large-scale assessments are designed to yield two or more scores for an individual by administering multiple sections measuring different but related skills. Multidimensional tests, or more specifically, simple structured tests, such as these rely on multiple multiple-choice and/or constructed responses sections of items to generate multiple…

With advances in technology, researchers and test developers are developing new item types to measure complex skills like problem solving and critical thinking. Analyzing such items is often challenging because of their complicated response patterns, and thus it is important to develop psychometric methods for practitioners and researchers to…

Although much attention has been given to rater effects in rater-mediated assessment contexts, little research has examined the overall stability of leniency and severity effects over time. This study examined longitudinal scoring data collected during three consecutive administrations of a large-scale, multi-state summative assessment program.…