Any examination that involves moderate to high stakes implications for examinees should be psychometrically sound and legally defensible. Currently, there are two broad and competing families of test theories that are used to score examination data. The majority of instructors outside the high-stakes testing arena rely on classical test theory…

This is the first in a series of five articles describing a national study of general education astronomy students' conceptual and reasoning difficulties with cosmology. In this paper, we describe the process by which we designed four new surveys to assess general education astronomy students' conceptual cosmology knowledge. These surveys focused…

Quality measurement is essential in every form of research, including institutional research and assessment. This paper addresses the erroneous assumptions institutional researchers often make with regard to survey research and provides an alternative method to producing more valid and reliable measures. Rasch measurement models are discussed and…

Purpose: International service-learning (ISL) is popular in higher education, and many physical therapy educational programs are adding ISL opportunities to their curricula because doing so aligns with student interest and the increasingly global nature of the profession. The faculty leading these experiences have not been studied. Nearly all…

The purpose of this study was to: 1) analyze the relationship of preprogram and nursing program variables on National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses (NCLEX-RN) success and failure, and 2) develop a model to predict success and failure on the NCLEX-RN. The convenience sample was comprised of 245 spring, summer, and fall midterm…

This exploratory study contributes to what is known about the college choice process by providing a quantitative comparative analysis to determine how high school graduates who identify teachers as influential in their choice of college differ from graduates who do not. Specifically, this study answers the following research question: How do…

This study examines Linguistic Competence in English Language (LCE) as a general indicator of Communicative Competence. A test and a questionnaire were administered to 1838 undergraduate freshmen from five major institutes of higher education in Aguascalientes, Mexico. The results of the test are analysed in their association with main features of…

Several extended caution indices (ECIs) have been introduced earlier as a link between two distinctly different approaches: one based on standard statistics and the other, a model-based approach, utilizing item response theory (IRT). Expected values and variance of some ECIs are derived and their statistical properties are compared and discussed.…

Provides a brief, nontechnical overview of latent trait models and argues for the preferability of these models (particularly the Rasch logistic model) over classical test models. Offers an example application of the Rasch model and discusses implications for the use of latent trait models for communication educators. (AEW)

This study examined the difficulty level of essay topics used in the large-scale assessment of writing in relation to five different scoring models, and sought to determine what effects the scoring models would have on passing rates. In model one, examinee's score is the direct result of a score assigned by the reader or the sum of scores assigned…

Given a loss function, an asymptotic method for optimal test design for a specified target population of examinees is presented. Also, of more practical use, given an existing unidimensional test and target population, a way is presented to find the loss function for which the test is optimal. (NSF)

A general approach is proposed for modeling the structure of a two-way contingency table, and for drawing inferences about the marginal and interaction effects, cell parameters, and conditional probabilities. The prior distribution expresses uncertainty in a simple reduced model, in particular the independence model. The posterior estimates of the…

A measurement approach called generalizability theory (G-theory) is an important alternative to the more familiar classical measurement theory that yields less useful coefficients such as alpha or the KR-20 coefficient. G-theory is a theory about the dependability of behavioral measurements that allows the simultaneous estimation of multiple…

Scales constructed under procedures and criteria outlined by the various traditional and latent trait methods were examined as to whether they varied in characteristics related to scale quality. Scales were constructed from a common pool of items analyzed in full form according to Likert and a one-parameter Rasch model for non-dichotomous data.…

This study used classical psychometric, latent trait, and nonparametric approaches to analyze 13- and 14-item scales of English language proficiency. Tests of English listening comprehension (dictation) and reading ("copytest") were constructed by modifying the standard dictation testing procedure to create items of text segments which…