The recommendation that the reliability of multiple-choice tests will be enhanced if the distribution of item difficulties is concentrated at approximately 0.50 is reinforced and extended in this article by viewing the 0/1 item scoring as a dichotomization of an underlying normally distributed ability score. (SLD)

Studied effects of students' use of calculators with 2 experimental forms of a university mathematics test taken by 765 and 725 college students, respectively. Calculator effects are not found for overall scores but are seen for some individual items. Analysis at the item level makes the actual impact apparent. (SLD)

A procedure for interpreting multiple-discrimination indices from a multidimensional item-response theory analysis is described and demonstrated with responses of 1,635 high school students to a multiple-choice test. The procedure consists of converting discrimination parameter estimates to direction cosines and analyzing the angular distances…

The usefulness of latent class modeling in addressing several measurement issues is demonstrated via a study of 74 good and 74 poor readers in grades 5 and 6. Procedures were particularly useful for assessing the hierarchical relation among skills and for exploring issues related to item domains. (SLD)