Differential item functioning (DIF) can occur across age, gender, ethnic, and/or linguistic groups of examinee populations. Therefore, whenever there is more than one group of examinees involved in a test, a possibility of DIF exists. It is important to detect items with DIF with accurate and powerful statistical methods. While finding a proper DIP method is essential, until now most of the available methods have been dominated by applications to large scale testing contexts. Since the early 1990s, Ramsay has developed a nonparametric item response methodology and computer software, TestGraf (Ramsay, 2000). The nonparametric item response theory (IRT) method requires fewer examinees and items than other item response theory methods and was also designed to detect DIF. However, nonparametric IRT's Type I error rate for DIF detection had not been investigated. The present study investigated the Type I error rate of the nonparametric IRT DIF detection method, when applied to moderate-to-small-scale testing context wherein there were 500 or fewer examinees in a group. In addition, the Mantel-Haenszel (MH) DIF detection method was included. A three-parameter logistic item response model was used to generate data for the two population groups. Each population corresponded to a test of 40 items. Item statistics for the first 34 non-DIF items were randomly chosen from the mathematics test of the 1999 TEVISS (Third International Mathematics and Science Study) for grade eight, whereas item statistics for the last six studied items were adopted from the DIF items used in the study of Muniz, Hambleton, and Xing (2001). These six items were the focus of this study. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

M.A.(Psychology) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

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The primary purpose of the project is to develop a web site where students can practice entry level mathematics questions.

The objective of the present project was to propose a new methodology for measuring misconceptions and subskills simultaneously using diagnostic information available from incorrect alternatives in multiple-choice tests designed for that purpose. Misconceptions are systematic and persistent errors that represent a learned intentional incorrect response (Brown & VanLehn, 1980; Ozkan & Ozkan, 2012). In prior research, Lee and Corter (2011) found that classification accuracy for their Bayesian Network misconception diagnosis models improved when latent higher-order subskills and specific wrong answers were included. Here, these contributions are adapted to a cognitively diagnostic measurement approach using the multiple-choice Deterministic Inputs Noisy “And” Gate (MC-DINA) model, first developed by de la Torre (2009b), by specifying dependencies between attributes to measure latent misconceptions and subskills simultaneously. A simulation study was conducted employing the proposed methodology (referred to as MC-DINA-H) across sample sizes (500, 1000, 2,000, and 5,000 examinees) and test lengths (15, 30, and 60 items) conditions. Eight attributes (4 misconceptions and 4 subskills) were included in the main simulation study. Attribute classification accuracy of the MC-DINA-H was compared to four less complex models and was found to more accurately classify attributes only when the attributes were relatively frequently required by multiple-choice options in the diagnostic assessment. The findings suggest that each attribute should be required by at least 15-20 percent of options in the diagnostic assessment.

This thesis presents an overview and analysis of tests conducted to measure the quality of clerical and secreterial skills obtained by commerce education students and concludes with suggestions for future testing.

Determining which students are at-risk of poorer outcomes -- such as dropping out, failing classes, or decreasing standardized examination scores -- has become an important area of both research and practice in K-12 education. The models produced from this type of predictive modeling research are increasingly used by high schools in Early Warning Systems to identify which students are at risk and intervene to support better outcomes. It has become common practice to re-build and validate these detectors, district-by-district, due to different data semantics and various risk factors for students in different districts. As these detectors become more widely used, however, a new challenge emerges in applying these detectors across a broad spectrum of school districts with varying availability of past student data. Some districts have insufficient high-quality past data for building an effective detector. Novel approaches that can address the complex data challenges a new district presents are critical for advancing the field. Using an ensemble-based algorithm, I develop a modeling approach that can generate a useful model for a previously unseen district. During the ensembling process, my approach, District Similarity Ensemble Extrapolation (DSEE), weights districts that are more similar to the Target district more strongly during ensembling than less similar districts. Using this approach, I can predict student-at-risk status effectively for unseen districts, across a range of grade ranges, and achieve prediction goodness but ultimately fails to perform better than the previously published Knowles (2015) and Bowers (2012) EWS models proposed for use across districts.

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