This study examined the problems that pre-service teachers face in the online assessment process and their suggestions for solutions to these problems. The participants were 136 pre-service teachers who have been experiencing online assessment for a long time and who took the Foundations of Open and Distance Learning course. This research is a…

Developing and writing assessment items that measure teachers' knowledge is an intricate and complex undertaking. In this paper, we begin with an overview of what is known about measuring teacher knowledge. We then highlight the challenges inherent in creating assessment items that focus specifically on measuring teachers' specialised knowledge…

This article proposes that sampling design effects have potentially huge unrecognized impacts on the results reported by large-scale district and state assessments in the United States. When design effects are unrecognized and unaccounted for they lead to underestimating the sampling error in item and test statistics. Underestimating the sampling…

Cognitive ability tests are widely used in organizations around the world because they have high predictive validity in selection contexts. Although these tests typically measure several subdomains, testing is usually carried out for a single subdomain at a time. This can be ineffective when the subdomains assessed are highly correlated. This…

Traditional methods for examining differential item functioning (DIF) in polytomously scored test items yield a single item-level index of DIF and thus provide no information concerning which score levels are implicated in the DIF effect. To address this limitation of DIF methodology, the framework of differential step functioning (DSF) has…

In the attempt to identify or prevent unfair tests, both quantitative analyses and logical evaluation are often used. For the most part, fairness evaluation is a pragmatic attempt at determining whether procedural or substantive due process has been accorded to either a group of test takers or an individual. In both the individual and comparative…

Compared to unidimensional item response models (IRMs), cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs) based on latent classes represent examinees' knowledge and item requirements using discrete structures. This study systematically examines the viability of retrofitting CDMs to IRM-based data with a linear attribute structure. The study utilizes a procedure…

Recently, educational researchers and practitioners have turned to value-added models to evaluate teacher performance. Although value-added estimates depend on the assessment used to measure student achievement, the importance of outcome selection has received scant attention in the literature. Using data from a large, urban school district, I…

In this study, we describe a framework for monitoring rater performance over time. We present several statistical indices to identify raters whose standards drift and explain how to use those indices operationally. To illustrate the use of the framework, we analyzed rating data from the 2002 Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition…

Although the Angoff procedure is among the most widely used standard setting procedures for tests comprising multiple-choice items, research has shown that subject matter experts have considerable difficulty accurately making the required judgments in the absence of examinee performance data. Some authors have viewed the need to provide…

In this article, we introduce a person-fit statistic called the hierarchy consistency index (HCI) to help detect misfitting item response vectors for tests developed and analyzed based on a cognitive model. The HCI ranges from -1.0 to 1.0, with values close to -1.0 indicating that students respond unexpectedly or differently from the responses…

Quality assurance in instructional development demands an exhaustive formative evaluation effort and applied testing. Unfortunately, this process is expensive and requires large numbers of user testers with characteristics similar to the intended audience. This article presents a procedure for increasing the efficiency of quality assurance efforts…

This commentary on the mismeasurement of language and reading comprehension abilities argues that quantitative measures of complex behaviors and subsequent ranking of individual performance often do not accurately reflect the abstract constructs they purport to measure, and inappropriate quantification and ranking create and perpetuate potentially…

In this article, the authors provide their critique on a set of papers that investigated Mathematics Knowledge for Teachers (MKT) assessment and the underlying theory and characteristics of the validity enterprise. Three types of assumptions and inferences--elemental, structural, and ecological--are discussed in these papers. These assumptions…

In this issue of Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research and Perspectives, Schilling et al. are explicit about the centrality of assessment design and development and psychometric analysis in validation. Schilling and colleagues, Kane (2004, 2006), other contemporary validity theorists and practitioners, and their predecessors typically discuss…