On Overall and Domain Latent Traits Estimation

• Activity Number: 165
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 4, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Committee on Applied Statisticians
• Author(s): Chun Wang*+ and Gongjun Xu
• Companies: University of Minnesota and University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
• Keywords: item response theory ; overall ability ; domain ability ; reliability

Abstract

In educational testing, reporting overall ability for accountability purposes along with finer grained domain scores for diagnostic purposes has become standard. Two item response theory (IRT) models that have been proposed and recently studied extensively for such purposes are multidimensional IRT model (MIRT) and higher-order IRT (HO-IRT) model. While previous research have shown, via simulation studies, that both models can provide reliable overall and domain ability estimates, this study intends to analytically show the differential performances of these two models. Furthermore, we will consider a novel situation when data are collected from two time points, and show the reliability of overall and domain change scores.