This study describes preliminary work on the development of a scale to assess attitude toward public drinking involvement. A sample of 46 students at a west-coast university participated in the study. Respondents completed a questionnaire containing a measure of Attitude Toward Public Drinking Involvement Scale (ATPDIS) and various validity…

A target partition analysis (TPA) was used to help seven subject matter experts, with little expertise in testing, evaluate relationships among test items. The subjects were experts in Income Maintenance in the field of public assistance work; they were trainers affiliated with the Professional Development Program's Income Maintenance Training…

A new approach to polychotomous scoring of test items, similar to "max-alpha" scaling (MAS) and known as polyweighting, has been developed. Unlike MAS, this new method of polychotomous scoring provides scoring weights for a given item that are independent of the difficulty of other items in the analysis. Moreover, the scoring weights are…

This study empirically examined the proposition that different item selection procedures contribute to the development of achievement tests that optimally serve different purposes. A test of 110 addition and subtraction problems was given to a sample of 371 first-grade students. Three subsets of 30 items were selected from this 110-item test. The…

Confirmatory multidimensional item response theory (CMIRT) was used to assess the structure of the Graduate Record Examination General Test, about which much information about factorial structure exists, using a sample of 1,001 psychology majors taking the test in 1984 or 1985. Results supported previous findings that, for this population, there…

The proposition that the optimal number of options in a multiple choice test item is three was examined. The concept of functional distractor, a plausible wrong answer that is negatively discriminating when total test performance is the criterion, is discussed. Three distinct groups of achievers (high, middle, and low) on a national standardized…

This manual describes and explains the commands available in the ITEMBANK package (a comprehensive test item bank). True-false, multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay items, as well as the associated answers, can be accommodated. Content domains and behavior categories exist for item classification. Most menus have instant action. Items and…

This study examined three statistical methods for selecting items for mastery tests. One is the pretest-posttest method due to Cox and Vargas (1966); it is computationally simple, but has a number of serious limitations. The second is a latent trait method recommended by van der Linden (1981); it is computationally complex, but has a number of…

A model for the validation of standardized tests of academic achievement upon populations not represented in the samples used to standardize the tests is presented, and the results of a field testing of the model are described. The 1973 editions of the Stanford Achievement Test and the Test of Academic Skills were administered to a sample of…

The Arizona Tax Research Association analyzed the Arizona Teacher Proficiency Examination (ATPE). An item analysis of the 150 questions administered to 2,430 applicants from July 1982 through March 1983 was undertaken. A minimum point biserial correlation coefficient of .33 indicated the validity of an item. Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of the…

Unidimensional item response theory (IRT) is widely used in the analysis and equating of educational achievement tests. If an IRT model is true, item response must be locally independent when the trait is held constant. Several measures of local dependence which are used in conjunction with the three-parameter logistic model in the analysis of…

Techniques for maximizing discrimination between groups in norm referenced measurement to reflect sensitivity to group differences inherent in the evaluation of multilevel educational systems are discussed. Data from the Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study (BTES) were used to examine relationships between reading and mathematics achievement and…

This report investigates an area of uncertainty in using the Angoff method for setting standards, namely whether or not a judge's conceptualizations of borderline group performance are realistic. Ratings are usually made with reference to the performance of this hypothetical group, therefore the Angoff method's success is dependent on this point.…

This report documents a computer program for simulation evaluation of item response theory (IRT) ability estimators. This Honeywell DPS version is a very slight modification of the program originally developed in FORTRAN-77 on a DEC VAX 11/780. The model of the world simulated by the program involves a unidimensional test in which the probability…