The application of item response theory (IRT) is almost universal in the development, implementation, and maintenance of large-scale assessments. Therefore, establishing the fit of IRT models to data is essential as the viability of calibration and equating implementations depend on it. In a typical test administration situation, measurement…

While the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted educational learning, the impacts of the pandemic may vary based on student demographics. The main purpose of this study was to determine if there were differences in student performance due to COVID-19 across several demographic variables. Multilevel mixed effects models compared the effects of COVID-19 in a…

In test equating, one critical equating property is the group invariance property which indicates that the equating function used to convert performance on each alternate form to the reporting scale should be the same for various subgroups. To mitigate the impact of disrupted learning on the item parameters during the COVID-19 pandemic, a…

A fundamental premise in assessment is that the underlying construct is equivalent across different groups of students and that this structure does not vary over years. The pandemic has potentially impacted opportunity to learn and disrupted the internal structure of assessments in various ways. Past research has suggested that students tended to…

Pandemic-related policies are typically developed by districts and translated to all schools for implementation. Understanding the degree to which the pandemic impacted school-level performance would provide additional perspective for researchers looking to help district and school officials move forward. The main purpose of this study is to…