Linear Models for Optimal Test Design

Wim van der Linden was just given a lifetime achievement award by the National Council on Measurement in Education. There is no one more prominent in the area of educational testing. §There are hundreds of computer-based credentialing exams in areas such as accounting, real estate, nursing, and securities, as well as the well-known admissions exams for college, graduate school, medical school, and law school - there is great need on the theory of testing.§This book presents the statistical theory and practice behind constructing good tests e.g., how is the first test item selected, how are the next items selected, and when do you have enough items.This book begins with a reflection on the history of test design--the core activity of all educational and psychological testing. It then presents a standard language for modeling test design problems as instances of multi-objective constrained optimization. The main portion of the book discusses test design models for a large variety of problems from the daily practice of testing, and illustrates their use with the help of numerous empirical examples. The presentation includes models for the assembly of tests to an absolute or relative target for their information functions, classical test assembly, test equating problems, item matching, test splitting, simultaneous assembly of multiple tests, tests with item sets, multidimensional tests, and adaptive test assembly. Two separate chapters are devoted to the questions of how to design item banks for optimal support of programs with fixed and adaptive tests. Linear Models for Optimal Test Design, which does not require any specific mathematical background, has been written to be a helpful resource on the desk of any test specialist.§Wim J. van der Linden is Professor of Measurement and Data Analysis, University of Twente, The Netherlands. His specialization is psychometric theory and methods, and he has been an active researcher of item response theory throughout his career. His current research is on test design, adaptive testing, test equating, and response-time modeling. Professor van der Linden is a past president of the Psychometric Society and a recipient of the NCME lifetime achievement award for his work on educational measurement.