Multidimensional Forced-Choice CAT With Dominance Items: An Empirical Comparison With Optimal Static Testing Under Different Desirability Matching

Several forced-choice (FC) computerized adaptive tests (CATs) have emerged in the field of organizational psychology, all of them employing ideal-point items. However, despite most items developed historically follow dominance response models, research on FC CAT using dominance items is limited. Existing research is heavily dominated by simulations and lacking in empirical deployment. This empirical study trialed a FC CAT with dominance items described by the Thurstonian Item Response Theory model with research participants. This study investigated important practical issues such as the implications of adaptive item selection and social desirability balancing criteria on score distributions, measurement accuracy and participant perceptions. Moreover, nonadaptive but optimal tests of similar design were trialed alongside the CATs to provide a baseline for comparison, helping to quantify the return on investment when converting an otherwise-optimized static assessment into an adaptive one. Although the benefit of adaptive item selection in improving measurement precision was confirmed, results also indicated that at shorter test lengths CAT had no notable advantage compared with optimal static tests. Taking a holistic view incorporating both psychometric and operational considerations, implications for the design and deployment of FC assessments in research and practice are discussed.     

Designing for Relationality in Virtual Reality: Context-Specific Learning as a Primer for Content Relevancy

Journal of Science Education and Technology - Science achievement gaps exhibit racial disparities starting in primary grades and have been shown to persist through middle and high school. In turn,...     

A Framework for Student Projects in Computer Networks

This paper describes the delivery of a computer networks course with accompanying materials and software. The course is offered at the fourth-year undergraduate level, and has few formal pre-requisites, other than general programming skills. There is a substantial architectural and coding component to any practical course on networks, and it is important to challenge the experienced and knowledgeable students without making the material too difficult for the inexperienced students who have minimal experience in programming practical applications. Some students have an industrial background and are expecting to build practical working applications. At the other extreme are students with no exposure to operating system principles, and therefore lacking pertinent knowledge, such as concurrency concepts. Our programming framework provides an event-polling approach to avoid the complexity of more general concurrency techniques. Protocol layers are implemented with data types and use a finite state machine model to control their behaviors. The resulting course offers code structure and support to students with minimal background, without sacrificing pertinent concepts, and provides the ability to construct elaborate network applications using the coding structures introduced in the course.