Gauging Item Alignment Through Online Systems While Controlling for Rater Effects

• Published in: Educational measurement, issues and practice Vol. 34; no. 1; pp. 22 - 33
• Main Authors: Anderson, Daniel, Irvin, Shawn, Alonzo, Julie, Tindal, Gerald A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.03.2015; Wiley-Blackwell; Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
• Subjects: Alignment (Education); Educational evaluation; Formative Evaluation; interim-formative assessment; Interrater Reliability; Item Banks; item-standard alignment; large-scale testing; Mathematics education; Mathematics Tests; Online Systems; Rasch modeling; rater effects; Research methodology; Standardized tests; test Development; Test Items
• ISSN: 0731-1745; 1745-3992
• DOI: 10.1111/emip.12038

The alignment of test items to content standards is critical to the validity of decisions made from standards‐based tests. Generally, alignment is determined based on judgments made by a panel of content experts with either ratings averaged or via a consensus reached through discussion. When the pool of items to be reviewed is large, or the content‐matter experts are broadly distributed geographically, panel methods present significant challenges. This article illustrates the use of an online methodology for gauging item alignment that does not require that raters convene in person, reduces the overall cost of the study, increases time flexibility, and offers an efficient means for reviewing large item banks. Latent trait methods are applied to the data to control for between‐rater severity, evaluate intrarater consistency, and provide item‐level diagnostic statistics. Use of this methodology is illustrated with a large pool (1,345) of interim‐formative mathematics test items. Implications for the field and limitations of this approach are discussed.