Test development is a crucial, yet difficult and time-consuming part of any educational system, and the task often falls all on teachers. Automatic item generation systems have recently drawn attention as they can reduce this burden and make test development more convenient. Such systems have been developed to generate items for vocabulary,…

The use of new test administration technologies such as computerized adaptive testing in high-stakes educational and occupational assessments demands large item pools. Classic item construction processes and previous approaches to automatic item generation faced the problems of a considerable loss of items after the item calibration phase. In this…

Allowing respondents to retake a cognitive ability test has shown to increase their test scores. Several theoretical models have been proposed to explain this effect, which make distinct assumptions regarding the measurement invariance of psychometric tests across test administration sessions with regard to narrower cognitive abilities and general…

The gender difference in three-dimensional mental rotation is well documented in the literature. In this article we combined automatic item generation, (quasi-)experimental research designs and item response theory models of change measurement to evaluate the effect of the ability to extract the depth information conveyed in the two-dimensional…

The future of test construction for certain psychological ability domains that can be analyzed well in a structured manner may lie--at the very least for reasons of test security--in the field of automatic item generation. In this context, a question that has not been explicitly addressed is whether it is possible to embed an item response theory…

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…

The 4th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2011) brings together researchers from computer science, education, psychology, psychometrics, and statistics to analyze large datasets to answer educational research questions. The conference, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, July 6-9, 2011, follows the three previous editions…