This booklet grew out of a half-day class on equating that author Samuel Livingston teaches for new statistical staff at Educational Testing Service (ETS). The class is a nonmathematical introduction to the topic, emphasizing conceptual understanding and practical applications. The class consists of illustrated lectures, interspersed with…

Estimation of item response model parameters and ability distribution parameters has been, and will remain, an important topic in the educational testing field. Much research has been dedicated to addressing this task. Some studies have focused on item parameter estimation when the latent ability was assumed to follow a normal distribution,…

The work described in this report is the second phase of a project to provide easy-to-use tools for authoring and rendering secondaryschool algebra-levelmath expressions insynthesized speech that is useful for studentswithblindnessor lowvision.This report describes the development and results of the second feedback study performed for our project,…

Providing information to test takers and test score users about the abilities of test takers at different score levels has been a persistent problem in educational and psychological measurement (Carroll, 1993). Scale anchoring (Beaton & Allen, 1992), a technique that describes what students at different points on a score scale know and can do,…

Standard 3.9 of the "Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing" (American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, & National Council for Measurement in Education, 1999) demands evidence of model fit when an item response theory (IRT) model is used to make inferences from a data set. We applied two recently…

As is the case for any statistical model, a multidimensional latent growth model comes with certain requirements with respect to the data collection design. In order to measure growth, repeated measurements of the same set of individuals are required. Furthermore, the data collection design should be specified such that no individual is given the…

Model checking is a crucial part of any statistical analysis. As educators tie models for testing to cognitive theory of the domains, there is a natural tendency to represent participant proficiencies with latent variables representing the presence or absence of the knowledge, skills, and proficiencies to be tested (Mislevy, Almond, Yan, &…