Conveners
New perspectives for developing short forms of tests
- Ottavia Epifania (Università di Trento)
While adaptive administration procedures are widely adopted in educational assessment, their application in psychological testing remains limited. A plausible reason for this delay may lie in the rigid administration rules required by classical test theory, that is all individuals receive the same items in the same order and must respond to all of them. These constraints are incompatible with...
As a general rule of thumb, the higher the number of items in a test, the better the measurement in terms of validity and reliability. However, there is a trade-off between the number of administered items and response quality. One of the challenges psychometrics and mathematical psychology have tackled is the development of short forms that could preserve the validity and reliability of...
Computerized adaptive assessment algorithms are a promising alternative to traditional fixed-length questionnaires in clinical assessment. Their ability to dynamically select the most informative items based on individual responses allows for substantial reductions in administration time while preserving the precision of trait estimation. As such, adaptive instruments function as personalized...
Tests covering broad subject areas may consist of many items, resulting in long and tiring assessments. Nevertheless, computerized adaptive testing may not be a viable solution if the necessary hardware is unavailable or if fairness issues arise. The talk is framed within competence-based knowledge space theory, which enables the assessment of the latent set of attributes (such as skills or...
When developing short forms of questionnaires, the most common approach under classical test theory is to retain the items with the highest factor loadings on each factor. Although this strategy generally produces short forms that perform well on standard reliability and validity metrics, it can unduly narrow the construct being measured by favouring highly correlated, homogenous items.
This...
Item Response Theory (IRT) provides an ideal framework for shortening existing tests given the detailed information on the measurement precision of each item with respect to different levels of the latent trait. As such, brief yet psychometrically sound short test forms (STFs), can be developed to prevent the loss of quality in the response process due to the respondents' fatigue. This...
