Equating test forms is an essential activity in standardized testing, with increased importance with the accountability systems in existence through the mandate of Adequate Yearly Progress. It is through equating that scores from different test forms become comparable, which allows for the tracking of changes in the performance of students from…

A college mathematics placement test with 25 basic algebra items and 15 calculus readiness items was administered to 1572 high school seniors, and first college mathematics course grades were obtained for 319 of these students. Test results indicated that more than two thirds of the high school graduates were not college ready, and the test…

Self-regulation has become a widely discussed subject in education as it facilitates learners' ability to master their own learning. The purpose of the present study is to examine the psychometric properties of self-regulation in second language learning via Rasch measurement. A total of 528 high-school students from an East Asian country…

The importance of school readiness to both the future of an individual child and society as a whole has given rise to several state-specific indexes designed to measure county-level risk for starting school unprepared to learn. One such index is the Oklahoma School Readiness Risk Index (OK SRRI), comprised of indicators known to be associated with…

Studies on science education show that students have many misunderstandings and misconceptions related to chemistry concepts. Many techniques have been used to determine those misconceptions such as multiple choice tests, interviews, drawing, etc. Two-tier diagnostic test is one of these techniques for using to determine misconceptions and their…

Being able to measure the level of proficiency in literacy and numeracy skills, and any changes in the level of skills, is important for getting a sense of how well language, literacy and numeracy programs are working. Among the tools used to measure language, literacy and numeracy proficiency in Australia are the Adult Literacy and Life Skills…

Sloutsky and Fisher (2012) attempt to reframe the results presented in Noles and Gelman (2012) as a pure replication of their original work validating the similarity, induction, naming, and categorization (SINC) model. However, their critique fails to engage with the central findings reported in Noles and Gelman, and their reanalysis fails to…

Testing is an important stage of teaching as it can assist teachers in auditing students' learning results. A good test is able to accurately reflect the capability of a learner. Nowadays, Computer-Assisted Testing (CAT) is greatly improving traditional testing, since computers can automatically and quickly compose a proper test sheet to meet user…

A testlet is a cluster of items that share a common passage, scenario, or other context. These items might measure something in common beyond the trait measured by the test as a whole; if so, the model for the item responses should allow for this testlet trait. But modeling testlet effects that are negligible makes the model unnecessarily…

This study investigates how different rounding rules and ways of providing Angoff standard-setting judgments affect cut-scores. A simulation design based on data from the National Assessment of Education Progress was used to investigate how rounding judgments to the nearest whole number (e.g., 0, 1, 2, etc.), nearest 0.05, or nearest two decimal…

The information matrix can equivalently be determined via the expectation of the Hessian matrix or the expectation of the outer product of the score vector. The identity of these two matrices, however, is only valid in case of a correctly specified model. Therefore, differences between the two versions of the observed information matrix indicate…

In 2009, DeMars stated that when impact exists there will be Type I error inflation, especially with larger sample sizes and larger discrimination parameters for items. One purpose of this study is to present the patterns of Type I error rates using Mantel-Haenszel (MH) and logistic regression (LR) procedures when the mean ability between the…

This article describes a computerized adaptive test (CAT) based on the uniform item exposure multi-form structure (uMFS). The uMFS is a specialization of the multi-form structure (MFS) idea described by Armstrong, Jones, Berliner, and Pashley (1998). In an MFS CAT, the examinee first responds to a small fixed block of items. The items comprising…

Model-based attempts to rigorously study the broad and imprecise concept of "discriminating power" are scarce, and generally limited to nonlinear models for binary responses. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework for assessing the discriminating power of item and test scores which are analyzed or obtained using Spearman's…

This study demonstrates how the stability of Mantel-Haenszel (MH) DIF (differential item functioning) methods can be improved by integrating information across multiple test administrations using Bayesian updating (BU). The authors conducted a simulation that showed that this approach, which is based on earlier work by Zwick, Thayer, and Lewis,…