Evaluating item response theory linking and model fit for data from PISA 2000–2012

ABSTRACT

Based on concerns about the item response theory (IRT) linking approach used in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) until 2012 as well as the desire to include new, more complex, interactive items with the introduction of computer-based assessments, alternative IRT linking methods were implemented in the 2015 PISA round. The new linking method represents a concurrent calibration using all available data, enabling us to find item parameters that maximize fit across all groups and allowing us to investigate measurement invariance across groups. Apart from the Rasch model that historically has been used in PISA operational analyses, we compared our method against more general IRT models that can incorporate item-by-country interactions. The results suggest that our proposed method holds promise not only to provide a strong linkage across countries and cycles but also to serve as a tool for investigating measurement invariance.     

Morphological structure: Latin and Greek roots and affixes as upper grade code strategies

Some students in the upper elementary grades and high schools may benefit from extended decoding and spelling instruction. These students, because of their age level and reading selections, require strategies going well beyond phonics. For these older readers, including adults, learning about morphological structure may provide the strategies needed to decode and spell multisyllabic words found often in literature and content area texts. In this paper, literature providing a rationale for such instruction is reviewed, and a curriculum and instructional plan is described.     

A Review of Get Out: On White Terror and the Black Body

This essay provides a review of Jordan Peele's film, Get Out. The author argues that Peele's Get Out illustrates the protracted terrorism that is whiteness and the concomitant objectification and utilization of the black body for white survival, accumulation, and pleasure. The film challenges those in education to consider how anti-blackness operates within schools and education policy. More specifically, those in education should challenge longstanding inequities that foreclose the presents and futures of black youth.     

Computer-graphics and the literary construct: a learning method

This paper describes a third-year undergraduate module, Text Through Images (TTI; known at first as Texts with Computers) which ran for some years in the School of English, University of Exeter, UK. Instead of using only words, TTI students made their own computer graphics both to discover and to describe literary structures in texts of their choice. The results were surprising: whatever their “academic” ability, students on this course regularly produced genuinely original literary perceptions, and their natural creativity was released. The module's innovative methods are eminently transferable to other disciplines. This paper is designed to be read in conjunction with a website: for further details, go to http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/asp/journal.asp?ref=0007-1013 presenting a selection of students' graphics produced on the course; these appear by generous permission of their makers, who hold copyright. The reasons for the module's success are elusive. Perhaps students feel unfettered by the attitudes associated with traditional verbal expression, the absence of preconceptions about the new process enabling them to bypass old habits of thought. Perhaps the interplay of word and image is particularly fruitful because images and words activate different areas of the brain. It may be that the computer creates the illusion of distance between design and designer, so that the latter feels less personally exposed than when drawing on paper. Perhaps success lies in the combination of individual freedom and on-screen group work, or on the way in which students are enabled to make small but publishable original discoveries. Educational psychologists may be able to explain why the mix works (it has been suggested that it represents a “constructivist/generative learning strategy that Dave Jonassen terms ‘elaboration’”) but more importantly, teachers may find the model useful. What interests me about the module is not the structure of the teaching, but the way in which the use of diagramming apparently enables the learner productively to bypass previous mental conditioning about how literature works, and what is acceptable in analysing it.     

An experimental two‐way video teletraining system: Design,development and evaluation

This paper describes the design, development and evaluation of an experimental two‐way video teletraining (VTT) system consisting of two classrooms equipped with audio and video equipment and linked by a land line to enable two‐way audio/video communication. A US Navy instructor delivered instruction in person to the originating classroom and electronically to the remote classroom. Findings were that student attitudes and performance on examinations were comparable in originating and remote classrooms. Students at the remote classroom were more likely to comment on deficiencies of the VTT system and were particularly sensitive to audio problems. Instructor acceptance of the VTT system was high. Cost analysis indicated that using the VTT system was more costly than sending an instructor to a remote site but that VTT can be less cosdy than sending students to the instructor.

The research described was performed under the sponsorship of the Office of Naval Technology. The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors, are not official, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Navy department.