A live tailored testing study was conducted to compare the results of using either the one-parameter logistic model or the three-parameter logistic model to measure the performance of college students on multiple choice vocabulary items. The results of the study showed the three-parameter tailored testing procedure to be superior to the…

Tailored testing by Cliff's method of implied orders was simulated through the use of responses gathered during conventional administration of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. Tailoring eliminated approximately half the responses with only modest decreases in score reliability. (Author/BW)

One form of adaptive testing involves a two-stage procedure. The first stage is the administration of a routing test. From this first test, an estimate of an examinee's ability is obtained. On the basis of this ability estimate, a second test focused on a given ability level is administered. The purpose of this study was to compare the efficiency…

Several important implications in latent trait theory, with implications for individualized or tailored testing, are pointed out. A way of using the information function in tailored testing in connection with the standard error estimation of the ability level using maximum likelihood estimation is suggested. (Author/JKS)

Monte Carlo research with TAILOR, a program using implied orders as a basis for tailored testing, is reported. TAILOR typically required about half the available items to estimate, for each simulated examinee, the responses on the remainder. (Author/CTM)

A study of Scholastic Aptitude Test scores for nine groups of students with disabilities taking special test administrations found differences in score levels among disability groups but no significant differences of measurement precision and no evidence of disadvantage for disabled students. (Author/MSE)

A new sharing item response theory (SIRT) model is presented that explicitly models the effects of sharing item content between informants and test takers. This model is used to construct adaptive item selection and scoring rules that provide increased precision and reduced score gains in instances where sharing occurs. The adaptive item selection…

Test validity is a concept that has often been ignored in the context of latent trait models and in modern test theory, particularly as it relates to computerized adaptive testing. Some considerations about the validity of a test and of a single item are proposed. This paper focuses on measures that are population-free and that will provide local…

The overall purpose of this research was to compare a maximum likelihood based tailored testing procedure to a Bayesian tailored testing procedure. The results indicated that both tailored testing procedures produced equally reliable ability estimates. Also an analysis of test length indicated that reasonable ability estimates could be obtained…

Tailored testing increases the efficiency of tests by individually selecting for each person a set of items from an item pool so that the difficulty of the items selected will be such as to maximize the information provided by the score. The tailored testing procedure designed by Cliff orders persons and items on a common ordinal scale and…

The example of a medical licensure test is used to demonstrate situations in which complex, integrated content must be balanced at the total test level for validity reasons, but items assigned to reportable subscore categories may be used under a multidimensional item response theory adaptive paradigm to improve subscore reliability. (SLD)

Discusses the use of computerized adaptive testing (CAT) in the classroom. Highlights include item response theory; sequential probability ratio test (SPRT); combining SPRT with expert system reasoning, resulting in EXSPRT; and a study of college students that examined the efficiency and accuracy of the various CAT methods discussed. (Contains 16…

A tailored testing model employing the beta distribution, whose mean equals the difficulty of an item and whose variance is approximately equal to the sampling variance of the item difficulty, and employing conditional item difficulties, is proposed. (Author)

TESTER, a computer program which produces individualized objective tests from a pool of items, is described. Available in both PL/1 and FORTRAN, TESTER may be executed either interactively or in batch. (Author/JKS)

Measures of consistency and completeness of order relations derived from test-type data are proposed. The measures are generalized to apply to incomplete data such as tailored testing. The measures are based on consideration of the items-plus-persons by items-plus-persons matrix as an adjacency matrix in which a 1 means that the row element…