Today, researchers have the ability to conduct their investigations in a number of different manners, including both traditional testing using university subject pool participants and the more recent method of online recruitment. Although the use of internet participants is becoming more popular, this area of research is still very much in its…

Data transformations have been promoted as a popular and easy-to-implement remedy to address the assumption of normally distributed errors (in the population) in linear regression. However, the application of data transformations introduces non-ignorable complexities which should be fully appreciated before their implementation. This paper adds to…

Many existing methods of statistical inference and analysis rely heavily on the assumption that the data are normally distributed. However, the normality assumption is not fulfilled when dealing with data which does not contain negative values or are otherwise skewed--a common occurrence in diverse disciplines such as finance, economics, political…

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a statistical method used to analyze the social structure and interactions among individuals within a network. SNA is used extensively in a number of disciplines such as sociology, geography, and communications research. However, the use of SNA by practitioners and researchers in assessment and evaluation is much…

The use of the aggregate scoring method for scoring concordance tests requires the weighting of test items to be derived from the performance of a group of experts who take the test under the same conditions as the examinees. However, the average score of experts constituting the reference panel remains a critical issue in the use of these tests.…

Item response theory (IRT) refers to a family of mathematical models which describe the relationship between latent continuous variables (attributes or characteristics) and their manifestations (dichotomous/polytomous observed outcomes or responses) with regard to a set of item characteristics. Researchers typically use parametric IRT (PIRT)…

Large-scale summative assessment results are typically used for program-evaluation and resource-allocation purposes; however, stakeholders increasingly desire results from large-scale K-12 assessments that inform instruction. Because large-scale summative results are usually delivered after the end of the school year, teacher use of results is…

Large-scale performance assessment programs are a longstanding reform tool. However, standard setting can be a challenge for assessment programs that use primarily non-standardized assessments. The purpose of this paper is to extend this field of research by explaining the standard setting methodology applied to one more recent instantiation of a…

As the theme of the 2022 annual meeting of the American Education Research Association, cultivating equitable education systems has gained renewed attention amid an increasingly diverse society. However, systemic inequalities persist for traditionally underserved student populations. As a way to better address diverse students' needs, it is of…

The purpose of this study is to introduce a method for converting scored 4-option multiple-choice (MC) items into scored 3-option MC items without re-pretesting the 3-option MC items. This study describes a six-step process for achieving this goal. Data from a professional credentialing exam was used in this study and the method was applied to 24…

Researchers often have hypotheses concerning the state of affairs in the population from which they sampled their data to compare group means. The classical frequentist approach provides one way of carrying out hypothesis testing using ANOVA to state the null hypothesis that there is no difference in the means and proceed with multiple comparisons…

Statistical process control (SPC) charts have been widely used in the field of educational measurement. The cumulative sum (CUSUM) is an established SPC method to detect aberrant responses for educational assessments. There are many studies that investigated the performance of CUSUM in different test settings. This paper describes the CUSUM…

Traditional estimators of reliability such as coefficients alpha, theta, omega, and rho (maximal reliability) are prone to give radical underestimates of reliability for the tests common when testing educational achievement. These tests are often structured by widely deviating item difficulties. This is a typical pattern where the traditional…

Using multiple versions of an assessment has the potential to introduce item environment effects. These types of effects result in version dependent item characteristics (i.e., difficulty and discrimination). Methods to detect such effects and resulting implications are important for all levels of assessment where multiple forms of an assessment…

Correct specifications of hierarchical attribute structures in analyses using diagnostic classification models (DCMs) are pivotal because misspecifications can lead to biased parameter estimations and inaccurate classification profiles. This research is aimed to demonstrate DCM analyses with various hierarchical attribute structures via Bayesian…