The development and validation of the Spanish-English Verbatim Translation Exam (SEVTE) is described. The test is for use by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the selection of applicants for the positions of Language Specialist or Contract Linguist. The report is divided into eight sections. Section 1 describes the need for the test,…

Questions are addressed that focus on why lower class and minority group test takers score lower on standardized tests than their middle class Anglo counterparts. The questions include the following: (1) In what ways can dialect differences affect testing? (2) How can dialect differences directly affect a test of language? (3) Shouldn't standard…

An alternative definition has been developed of the delta scale of item difficulty used at Educational Testing Service. The traditional delta scale uses an inverse normal transformation based on normal ogive models developed years ago. However, no use is made of this fact in typical uses of item deltas. It is simply one way to make the probability…

A model was developed to provide a uniform method for vocational and technical education content experts to develop test items (written questions and performance measures) that are congruous with course-level exit competencies. The model is essentially a closed-system approach in that specific action verbs must be identified and operationally…

Setting standards for the purpose of certification is frequently performed using judgmental techniques such as the Angoff method. This study was performed to identify types of items that judges find hard to rate accurately, that is, types of items on which examinees perform differently than predicted by the judges. Once identified these item types…

The stability of selected indices for detecting differential item performance (item bias), from one randomly equivalent sample to another, is addressed. Some recent research has criticized these indices as too unreliable for utility in measuring bias in achievement test items. Using data from a national testing of the ACT Assessment, however, this…

Rescoring of Center for Occupational and Professional Assessment objective-referenced tests is decided largely by content experts selected by client organizations. A few of the test items, statistically flagged for review, are not rescored. Some of this incongruence could be due to the use of the biserial correlation (r-biserial) as an…

The construction of parallel tests from item response theory (IRT) based item banks is discussed. Tests are considered parallel whenever their information functions are identical. After the methods for constructing parallel tests are considered, the computational complexity of 0-1 linear programming and the heuristic procedure applied are…

Fisher's information measure for the item difficulty parameter in the Rasch model and its marginal and conditional formulations are investigated. It is shown that expected item information in the unconditional model equals information in the marginal model, provided the assumption of sampling examinees from an ability distribution is made. For the…

Nine methods for automated test construction are described. All are based on the concepts of information from item response theory. Two general kinds of methods for the construction of parallel tests are presented: (1) sequential test design; and (2) simultaneous test design. Sequential design implies that the tests are constructed one after the…

This research brief summarizes the available reliability and validity data available in, but spread throughout, a number of General Educational Development (GED) Testing Service publications. A section on reliability discusses how to determine reliability of a test's scores and two ways of assessing the reliability of a test--internal consistency…

Explored are two theoretical approaches that attempt to cope with omitted responses, that is, when an examinee omits (fails to respond to) an item and therefore the item response formula cannot be used. Preliminary considerations are discussed, and it is shown that a conveniently simple application of equivalent items leads to internal…

Data from the Scholastic Aptitude Test-Verbal (SAT-V), SAT Mathematics (SAT-M), and Achievement Tests in Biology, American History, and Social Studies were used for this study. The temporal stability of item parameter estimates obtained for the same set of items calibrated for different examinees at different times was analyzed. It was believed…

The purpose of this paper is to present a generalization of the concept of item difficulty to test items that measure more than one dimension. Three common definitions of item difficulty were considered: the proportion of correct responses for a group of individuals; the probability of a correct response to an item for a specific person; and the…

Item response curves for a set of binary responses are studied from a Bayesian viewpoint of estimating the item parameters. For the two-parameter logistic model with normally distributed ability, restricted bivariate beta priors are used to illustrate the computation of the posterior mode via the EM algorithm. The procedure is illustrated by data…