Equating is an essential tool in educational assessment due the critical role it plays in several key areas: establishing validity across forms and years; fairness; test security; and, increasingly, continuity in programs that release items or require ongoing development. Although the practice of equating is rooted in long standing practices that…

Two different traditions of response-time (RT) modeling are reviewed: the tradition of distinct models for RTs and responses, and the tradition of model integration in which RTs are incorporated in response models or the other way around. Several conceptual issues underlying both traditions are made explicit and analyzed for their consequences. We…

In information-rich environments, schools are often presented with a myriad of data from which decisions need to be made. The use of the information on a classroom level may be facilitated if performance could be described in terms of levels of proficiency or benchmarks. The aim of this article is to explore benchmarks using data from a monitoring…

Purpose: The main aim of this paper is to develop guidelines on the critical issues to consider in research design in an action research (AR) environment for SME network capability development. Design/methodology/approach: The issues in research design for AR studies are developed from the authors' experience in running learning sets but, in…

This study was inspired by the final regulations for the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) indicating that each state has the option to develop a new assessment for students whose disabilities have kept them from obtaining proficiency. Sets of high school science achievement items were enhanced for the new test. A 3-by-2, within subjects,…

National tests, public examinations, and vocational qualifications in England are used for a variety of purposes, including the certification of individual learners in different subject areas and the accountability of individual professionals and institutions. However, there has been ongoing debate about the reliability and validity of their…

It is a bitter reality that the curricula and traditional pedagogy prevailing in public schools of Pakistan in general and Sindh in particular do not incorporate the algebraic concepts properly. Both the content and the presentation therein cannot be considered up to the mark, thereby making "Algebra" a tough and dry subject. This…

Alternative approaches are discussed for use of e-rater[R] to score the TOEFL iBT[R] Writing test. These approaches involve alternate criteria. In the 1st approach, the predicted variable is the expected rater score of the examinee's 2 essays. In the 2nd approach, the predicted variable is the expected rater score of 2 essay responses by the…

Three decision consistency and accuracy (DC/DA) methods, the Livingston and Lewis (LL) method, LEE method, and the Hambleton and Han (HH) method, were evaluated. The purposes of the study were: (1) to evaluate the accuracy and robustness of these methods, especially when their assumptions were not well satisfied, (2) to investigate the "true"…

Within a response to intervention model, educators increasingly use progress monitoring (PM) to support medium- to high-stakes decisions for individual students. For PM to serve these more demanding decisions requires more careful consideration of measurement error. That error should be calculated within a fixed linear regression model rather than…

In the arena of educational testing, accessibility refers to the degree to which students are given the opportunity to participate in and engage a test. Accessibility theory is a model for examining the interactions between the test-taker and the test itself and defining how they may decrease some students' access to the test event, ultimately…

Although concept inventories are among the most frequently used tools in the physics and astronomy education communities, they are rarely evaluated using item response theory (IRT). When IRT models fit the data, they offer sample-independent estimates of item and person parameters. IRT may also provide a way to measure students' learning gains…

Models of modern test theory imply statistical independence among responses, generally referred to as "local independence." One violation of local independence occurs when the response to one item governs the response to a subsequent item. Expanding on a formulation of this kind of violation as a process in the dichotomous Rasch model,…

Flynn wrote a book devoted to the Flynn effect, featuring his theoretical explanation of why the intelligence of worldwide populations has apparently increased from generation to generation. The essence of his theorizing is that because of the societal impact of scientific technology, people of today are much more guided by abstract, rather than…

In this study, the Classical test theory and generalizability theory were used for determination to reliability of scores obtained from measurement tool of mathematics success. 24 open-ended mathematics question of the TIMSS-1999 was applied to 203 students in 2007-spring semester. Internal consistency of scores was found as 0.92. For…