The commentary and overview explored how curriculum and assessment reforms are being used by a small university and small country to improve the quality of education and gain international recognition. Although the reforms are potentially beneficial to the students, university, and country, there are dilemmatic factors that may either enhance or…

Although classroom assessment is one of the most frequent practices carried out by teachers in all educational programs, limited research has been conducted to investigate the dependability and validity of criterion-referenced tests (CRTs). The main purpose of this study is to develop a criterion-referenced test for first-year Japanese university…

Operational testing programs employing item response theory (IRT) applications benefit from of the property of item parameter invariance whereby item parameter estimates obtained from one sample can be applied to other samples (when the underlying assumptions are satisfied). In theory, this feature allows for applications such as computer-adaptive…

Standards-based reform, as codified by the No Child Left Behind Act, relies on the ability of assessments to accurately reflect the learning that takes place in U.S. classrooms. However, this property of assessments--their instructional sensitivity--is rarely, if ever, investigated by test developers, states, or researchers. In this paper, the…

In this commentary, the author addresses what is referred to as the deterministic input, noisy "and" gate (DINA) model. The author mentions concerns with how this model has been formulated and presented. In particular, the author points out that there is a lack of recognition of the confounding of profiles that generally arises and then discusses…

Growing recognition of the central importance of fostering an in-depth understanding of natural selection has, surprisingly, failed to stimulate work on the development and rigorous evaluation of instruments that measure knowledge of it. We used three different methodological tools, the Conceptual Inventory of Natural Selection (CINS), a modified…

The comparability of examinations in different subjects has been a controversial topic for many years and a number of criticisms have been made of statistical approaches to estimating the "difficulties" of achieving particular grades in different subjects. This paper argues that if comparability is understood in terms of a linking…

The No Child Left Behind Act and the accountability movement in public education caused many states to develop criterion-referenced academic achievement tests. Scores from these tests are often used to make high stakes decisions. Even so, these tests typically do not receive independent psychometric scrutiny. We evaluated the 2005 Arkansas…

On a general level, the objective of diagnostic classifications models (DCMs) lies in a classification of individuals regarding multiple latent skills. In this article, the authors show that this objective can be achieved by multidimensional adaptive testing (MAT) as well. The authors discuss whether or not the restricted applicability of DCMs can…

This study examined the effectiveness of two different domain definition strategies in achieving homogeneity of criterion-referenced test items. The argument was tested regarding the extent to which item writers following the Instructional Objectives Exchange (IOX) domain definition strategy for a cognitive skill generate items that are more…

Examines four factors involved in the determination of how many test items should be constructed or sampled for a set of objectives: (1) the type of decision to be made with results, (2) importance of objectives, (3) number of objectives, and (4) practical constraints. Specific guidelines that teachers and evaluators can use and an illustrative…

The rationale for use of instructional sensitivity in the empirical review of test items is examined, and the results of a study that distinguishes instructional sensitivity from other item concepts are presented. Research is reviewed which indicates the existence of instructional sensitivity as a unique criterion-referenced test item concept. (RL)

Attention is drawn to the dynamics of criterion-referenced test (CRT) construction in this report. How CRT's are developed at the Instructional Objectives Exchange is described through a series of three steps. The procedures pertain to the construction of "off the shelf" as well as "customized" tests. Step one, isolating the…

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 major emphasis of this paper is in the examination of test item response patterns. Tatsuoka and Tatsuoka (1980) have developed two indices of response consistency: the norm-conformity index (NCI) and the individual consistency index (ICI). The NCI provides a measure of the degree of consistency between the response pattern of an individual and…