This paper provides some evidence that repeat taking of competitive exams may reduce the impact of background disadvantages on educational outcomes. Using administrative data on the university entrance exam in Turkey, the paper estimates cumulative learning between the first and the nth attempt...

To address the lack of attention to construct shift in IRT vertical scaling, a bifactor model is proposed to estimate the common dimension for all grades and the grade-specific dimensions. The bifactor model estimation accuracy is evaluated through a simulation study with manipulated factors of...

Growth mixture modeling has gained much attention in applied and methodological social science research recently, but the selection of the number of latent classes for such models remains a challenging issue. This problem becomes more serious when one of the key assumptions of this model, proper...

Fairness is necessary to successful evaluation, whether the context is simple and concrete or complex and abstract. Fair evaluation must begin with careful data collection, with clear operationalization of variables whose relationship(s) will represent the outcome(s) of interest. In particular,...

Multiple factors have influenced testing agencies to more carefully consider the manner and frequency in which pretest item data are collected and analyzed. One potentially promising development is judges' estimates of item difficulty. Accurate estimates of item difficulty may be used to reduce...

The presence of outlying anchor items is an issue faced by many testing agencies. The decision to retain or remove an item is a difficult one, especially when the content representation of the anchor set becomes questionable by item removal decisions. Additionally, the reason for the aberrancy...

Although the design of Multistage testing (MST) has received increasing attention, previous studies mostly focused on comparison of the psychometric properties of MST with CAT and paper-and-pencil (P&P) test. Few studies have systematically examined the number of items in the routing test, the...

The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of the local item dependence (LID) of testlet items on the performance of the multistage tests (MST) that make pass/fail decisions. In this study, LID is simulated in testlet items. Testlet items are those that physically share the...

The study was carried out to accomplish three goals : (1) Propose graphical displays of IRT model fit at the item level and suggest fit procedures at the test level that are not impacted by large sample size, (2) examine the impact of IRT model misfit on proficiency classifications, and (3)...

In educational measurement, responses of students on items are used not only to measure the ability of students, but also to evaluate and compare the performance of schools. Analysis should ideally account for the multilevel structure of the data, and school-level processes not related to...