For large-scale assessments, data are often collected with missing responses. Despite the wide use of item response theory (IRT) in many testing programs, however, the existing literature offers little insight into the effectiveness of various approaches to handling missing responses in the context of scale linking. Scale linking is commonly used…

Statistical Analysis Software (SAS) is a widely used tool for data management analysis across a variety of fields. The procedure for item response theory (PROC IRT) is one to perform unidimensional and multidimensional item response theory (IRT) analysis for dichotomous and polytomous data. This review provides a summary of the features of PROC…

Trend scoring constructed response items (i.e. rescoring Time A responses at Time B) gives rise to two-way data that follow a product multinomial distribution rather than the multinomial distribution that is usually assumed. Recent work has shown that the difference in sampling model can have profound negative effects on statistics usually used to…

A major challenge in the widespread application of Mokken scale analysis (MSA) to educational performance assessments is the requirement of complete data, where every rater rates every student. In this study, simulated and real data are used to demonstrate a method by which researchers and practitioners can apply MSA to incomplete rating designs.…

Multidimensional Item Response Theory (MIRT) is widely used in assessment and evaluation of educational and psychological tests. It models the individual response patterns by specifying functional relationship between individuals' multiple latent traits and their responses to test items. One major challenge in parameter estimation in MIRT is that…

The "2nd Annual WPI-UMASS-UPENN EDM Data Mining Challenge" required contestants to predict efficient testtaking based on log data. In this paper, we describe our theory-driven and psychometric modeling approach. For feature engineering, we employed the Log-Normal Response Time Model for estimating latent person speed, and the Generalized…

In Huggins-Manley & Han (2017), it was shown that WLSMV global model fit indices used in structural equating modeling practice are sensitive to person parameter estimate RMSE and item difficulty parameter estimate RMSE that results from local dependence in 2-PL IRT models, particularly when conditioning on number of test items and sample size.…

This research focuses on the everyday challenge in academic learning of assessment, and argues that academic buoyancy is a key factor in academic success. To scaffold students' learning and effectively support academic buoyancy, there is arguably a need for a better understanding of: (i) what students find most and least useful in their assessment…

We introduce an approach for making a quantitative comparison of the item response curves (IRCs) of any two populations on a multiple-choice test instrument. In this study, we employ simulated and actual data. We apply our approach to a dataset of 12,187 participants on the 25-item Science Literacy Concept Inventory (SLCI), which includes ample…

The School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS) is managed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education. SSOCS collects extensive crime and safety data from principals and administrators of public schools in the United States. Data from this collection can be…

We demonstrate how the DEWIS e-Assessment system may use embedded R code to facilitate the assessment of students' ability to perform involved statistical analyses. The R code has been written to emulate SPSS output and thus the statistical results for each bespoke data set can be generated efficiently and accurately using standard R routines.…

In the age of "Big Data," information is often quantitative in nature. The ability to analyze information through the sifting of data has been identified as a core competency for success in navigating daily life and participation in the contemporary workforce. This skill, known as Quantitative Reasoning (QR), is characterized by the…

Logged tracking data for online courses are generally not available to instructors, students, and course designers and developers, and even if these data were available, most content-oriented instructors do not have the skill set to analyze them. Learning analytics, mined from logged course data and usually presented in the form of learning…

Purpose: Studies in the literature have generally demonstrated that the causes of differential item functioning (DIF) are complex and not directly related to defined groups. The purpose of this study is to determine the DIF according to the mixture item response theory (MixIRT) model, based on the latent group approach, as well as the…

The point of this study is to define the effect of project-based learning approach on 8th Grade secondary-school students' statistical literacy levels for data representation. To achieve this goal, a test which consists of 12 open-ended questions in accordance with the views of experts was developed. Seventy 8th grade secondary-school students, 35…