Psychometrics Behind Computerized Adaptive Testing

• Published in: Psychometrika Vol. 80; no. 1; pp. 1 - 20
• Main Author: Chang, Hua-Hua
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01.03.2015; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adaptive Testing; Algorithms; Assessment; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Computer Assisted Testing; Computers; Educational Measurement - methods; Estimates; Humanities; Humans; Individualized Instruction; Item Analysis; Law; Models, Statistical; Probability Theory; Psychology; Psychometrics; Psychometrics - methods; Quantitative psychology; Random variables; Sample variance; Statistical Theory and Methods; Statistics for Social Sciences; Testing and Evaluation; CD-CAT; constraint management; response time; computerized adaptive testing; martingale theory; sequential design; multidimensional CAT; stratified item selection
• ISSN: 0033-3123; 1860-0980
• DOI: 10.1007/s11336-014-9401-5

The paper provides a survey of 18 years’ progress that my colleagues, students (both former and current) and I made in a prominent research area in Psychometrics—Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT). We start with a historical review of the establishment of a large sample foundation for CAT. It is worth noting that the asymptotic results were derived under the framework of Martingale Theory, a very theoretical perspective of Probability Theory, which may seem unrelated to educational and psychological testing. In addition, we address a number of issues that emerged from large scale implementation and show that how theoretical works can be helpful to solve the problems. Finally, we propose that CAT technology can be very useful to support individualized instruction on a mass scale. We show that even paper and pencil based tests can be made adaptive to support classroom teaching.