This article presents an interview with Karl Gustav Joreskog. Karl Gustav Joreskog was born in Amal, Sweden, on April 25, 1935. He did his undergraduate studies at Uppsala University from 1955 to 1957, with a major in mathematics and physics. He received a PhD in statistics at Uppsala University in 1963, and he was a research statistician at…

Confucius pointed out that the first step toward wisdom is calling things by the right name. The term "Differential Item Functioning" (DIF) did not arise fully formed from the miasma of psychometrics, it evolved from a variety of less accurate terms. Among its forebears was "item bias" but that term has a pejorative connotation that does not…

In this essay, the author tries to look forward into the 21st century to divine three things: (i) What skills will researchers in the future need to solve the most pressing problems? (ii) What are some of the most likely candidates to be those problems? and (iii) What are some current areas of research that seem mined out and should not distract…

This article presents an interview with Linda Gottfredson (nee Howarth), who obtained her BA (psychology, Phi Beta Kappa) from UC Berkeley in 1969, served in the Peace Corps in the Malaysian Health Service from 1969 to 1972, and received her PhD (sociology) from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in 1976. She was Research Scientist at JHU's Center for…

In the course of screening a form of a medical licensing exam for items that function differentially (DIF) between men and women, the authors used the traditional Mantel-Haenszel (MH) statistic for initial screening and a Bayesian method for deeper analysis. For very easy items, the MH statistic unexpectedly often found DIF where there was none.…

Fumiko Samejima is best known for her pioneering work in polytomous response item response theory (IRT), yielding the eponymous model that has been used broadly for more than 30 years. In this interview, Samejima, on the verge of retiring from her faculty position at the University of Tennessee, discusses her life and career. She also describes…

This article presents an interview with Susan E. Embretson. Embretson attended the University of Minnesota where she received her bachelor's degree in 1967 and earned a PhD in 1973 in psychology. She became an assistant professor at the University of Kansas in 1974 and was promoted to associate professor and full professor. In 2004, she accepted a…

This article presents an interview with R. Darrell Bock. He served as president of the Psychometric Society from 1972-1973. He has received the National Council on Measurement in Education award for "Contributions to the Design and Analysis of Educational Assessment" in 1990, the Educational Testing Service award for "Distinguished Contributions…

Suggests that because of the nonlinear relationship between item usage and item security, the problems of test security posed by continuous administration of standardized tests cannot be resolved merely by increasing the size of the item pool. Offers alternative strategies to overcome these problems, distributing test items so as to avoid the…

Four guidelines that make tables more effective data displays are presented. The need for these guidelines and their application are illustrated with data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). A theoretical structure is presented to help develop test items to assess students' proficiency in extracting information from…

Provides a general mathematical framework is provided that can be specialized to four different reliability coefficients. Consideration of this general framework makes it easier to convey to students the individual character of the formulations of reliability and the extent of their underlying similarity. (SLD)