Both testlet design and hierarchical latent traits are fairly common in educational and psychological measurements. This study aimed to develop a new class of higher order testlet response models that consider both local item dependence within testlets and a hierarchy of latent traits. Due to high dimensionality, the authors adopted the Bayesian…

In 23 states, members of the high school class of 2008 were required to pass a state high school exit examination (HSEE) to earn regular high school diplomas. Proponents of these policies claim that they improve student academic achievement, although critics argue that they reduce the quality of instruction without raising academic achievement.…

The Bayesian approach to setting passing scores, as proposed by Swaminathan, Hambleton, and Algina, is compared with the empirical Bayes approach to the same problem that is derived from Huynh's decision-theoretic framework. Comparisons are based on simulated data which follow an approximate beta-binomial distribution and on real test results from…