Disengaged responding poses a severe threat to the validity of educational large-scale assessments, because item responses from unmotivated test-takers do not reflect their actual ability. Existing identification approaches rely primarily on item response times, which bears the risk of misclassifying fast engaged or slow disengaged responses.…

This study seeks to compare fixed and mixed effects models for the purposes of predictive classification in the presence of multilevel data. The first part of the study utilizes a Monte Carlo simulation to compare fixed and mixed effects logistic regression and random forests. An applied examination of the prediction of student retention in the…

When cognitive and educational tests are administered under time limits, tests may become speeded and this may affect the reliability and validity of the resulting test scores. Prior research has shown that time limits may create or enlarge gender gaps in cognitive and academic testing. On average, women complete fewer items than men when a test…

Even though the impact of the position of response options on answers to multiple-choice items has been investigated for decades, it remains debated. Research on this topic is inconclusive, perhaps because too few studies have obtained experimental data from large-sized samples in a real-world context and have manipulated the position of both…

The Mantel-Haenszel estimator is one of the most popular techniques for measuring differential item functioning (DIF). A generalization of this estimator is applied to the context of DIF to compare items by taking the covariance of odds ratio estimators between dependent items into account. Unlike the Item Response Theory, the method does not rely…

We examined the performance of coefficient alpha and its potential competitors (ordinal alpha, omega total, Revelle's omega total [omega RT], omega hierarchical [omega h], greatest lower bound [GLB], and coefficient "H") with continuous and discrete data having different types of non-normality. Results showed the estimation bias was…

Automated scoring of free drawings or images as responses has yet to be used in large-scale assessments of student achievement. In this study, we propose artificial neural networks to classify these types of graphical responses from a TIMSS 2019 item. We are comparing classification accuracy of convolutional and feed-forward approaches. Our…

As researchers in the social sciences, we are often interested in studying not directly observable constructs through assessments and questionnaires. But even in a well-designed and well-implemented study, rapid-guessing behavior may occur. Under rapid-guessing behavior, a task is skimmed shortly but not read and engaged with in-depth. Hence, a…

Assessments with a large amount of small, similar, or often repetitive tasks are being used in educational, neurocognitive, and psychological contexts. For example, respondents are asked to recognize numbers or letters from a large pool of those and the number of correct answers is a count variable. In 1960, George Rasch developed the Rasch…

Anonymous questionnaires are frequently used in research with adolescents in order to obtain sincere answers about sensitive topics. Most longitudinal studies include self-generated identification codes (SGICs) to match information. Typical elements include a combination of letters and digits from personal data. However, these data may make the…

Performance assessments heavily rely on human ratings. These ratings are typically subject to various forms of error and bias, threatening the assessment outcomes' validity and fairness. Differential rater functioning (DRF) is a special kind of threat to fairness manifesting itself in unwanted interactions between raters and performance- or…

The possible dependency of criterion validity on item formulation in a multicomponent measuring instrument is examined. The discussion is concerned with evaluation of the differences in criterion validity between two or more groups (populations/subpopulations) that have been administered instruments with items having differently formulated item…

Careless responding is a bias in survey responses that disregards the actual item content, constituting a threat to the factor structure, reliability, and validity of psychological measurements. Different approaches have been proposed to detect aberrant responses such as probing questions that directly assess test-taking behavior (e.g., bogus…

The effects of different response option orders on survey responses have been studied extensively. The typical research design involves examining the differences in response characteristics between conditions with the same item stems and response option orders that differ in valence--either incrementally arranged (e.g., strongly disagree to…

This paper presents a mixture item response tree (IRTree) model for extreme response style. Unlike traditional applications of single IRTree models, a mixture approach provides a way of representing the mixture of respondents following different underlying response processes (between individuals), as well as the uncertainty present at the…