Differential item functioning (DIF) is often used to examine validity evidence of alternate form test accommodations. Unfortunately, traditional approaches for evaluating DIF are prone to selection bias. This article proposes a novel DIF framework that capitalizes on regression discontinuity design analysis to control for selection bias. A…

This study aims to examine the effects of mixture item response theory (IRT) models on item parameter estimation and classification accuracy under different conditions. The manipulated variables of the simulation study are set as mixture IRT models (Rasch, 2PL, 3PL); sample size (600, 1000); the number of items (10, 30); the number of latent…

Recent research has suggested that re-setting the standard for each administration of a small sample examination, in addition to the high cost, does not adequately maintain similar performance expectations year after year. Small-sample equating methods have shown promise with samples between 20 and 30. For groups that have fewer than 20 students,…

In educational contexts, students often self-select into specific interventions (e.g., courses, majors, extracurricular programming). When students self-select into an intervention, systematic group differences may impact the validity of inferences made regarding the effect of the intervention. Propensity score methods are commonly used to reduce…

In meta-analytic studies, there are often multiple moderators available (eg, study characteristics). In such cases, traditional meta-analysis methods often lack sufficient power to investigate interaction effects between moderators, especially high-order interactions. To overcome this problem, meta-CART was proposed: an approach that applies…

The temporal contiguity effect (TCE) is the tendency for the recall of one event to cue recall of other events originally experienced nearby in time. Retrieved context theory proposes that the TCE results from fundamental properties of episodic memory: binding of events to a drifting context representation during encoding and the reinstatement of…

One important issue in Bayesian estimation is the determination of an effective informative prior. In hierarchical Bayes models, the uncertainty of hyperparameters in a prior can be further modeled via their own priors, namely, hyper priors. This study introduces a framework to construct hyper priors for both the mean and the variance…

The mass participation in higher education has led to greater spending by governments and students which has increased the focus on graduate outcomes. In England, the Office for Students (OfS) is planning to take regulatory action, using the Proceed metric, against universities and their courses which do not have 60% of students with positive…

The unstructured multiple-attempt (MA) item response data in virtual learning environments (VLEs) are often from student-selected assessment data sets, which include missing data, single-attempt responses, multiple-attempt responses, and unknown growth ability across attempts, leading to a complex and complicated scenario for using this kind of…

The aim of this study was to examine the precision of item parameter estimation in different sample sizes and test lengths under three parameter logistic model (3PL) item response theory (IRT) model, where the trait measured by a test was not normally distributed or had a skewed distribution. In the study, number of categories (1-0), and item…

The present study evaluated the multiple imputation method, a procedure that is similar to the one suggested by Li and Lissitz (2004), and compared the performance of this method with that of the bootstrap method and the delta method in obtaining the standard errors for the estimates of the parameter scale transformation coefficients in item…

This study aimed to determine for continuous outcomes dependent on baseline risk, whether funnel plot asymmetry may be due to statistical artefact rather than publication bias and evaluate a novel test to resolve this. Firstly, we conducted assessment for publication bias in nine meta-analyses of postoperative analgesics (344 trials with 25 348…

Two families of analysis methods can be used for differential item functioning (DIF) analysis. One family is DIF analysis based on observed scores, such as the Mantel-Haenszel (MH) and the standardized proportion-correct metric for DIF procedures; the other is analysis based on latent ability, in which the statistic is a measure of departure from…

This dissertation informed researchers about the performance of different level-specific and target-specific model fit indices in Multilevel Latent Growth Model (MLGM) using unbalanced design and different trajectories. As the use of MLGMs is a relatively new field, this study helped further the field by informing researchers interested in using…

Traditional psychometric guidelines suggest that at least several hundred respondents are needed to obtain accurate parameter estimates under the Rasch model. However, recent research indicates that Rasch equating results in accurate parameter estimates with sample sizes as small as 25. Item parameter drift under the Rasch model has been…