Legal and Psychometric Criteria for Evaluating Teacher Certification Tests

Will our teacher certification testing program stand up to a court challenge? What are the critical issues the courts consider in examining teacher certification testing? What do we need to do to strengthen our program legally and psychometrically?     

Validating Student Score Inferences With Person‐Fit Statistic and Verbal Reports: A Person‐Fit Study for Cognitive Diagnostic Assessment

The goal of this study was to investigate the usefulness of person‐fit analysis in validating student score inferences in a cognitive diagnostic assessment. In this study, a two‐stage procedure was used to evaluate person fit for a diagnostic test in the domain of statistical hypothesis testing. In the first stage, the person‐fit statistic, the hierarchy consistency index (HCI; Cui, 2007 ; Cui & Leighton, 2009 ), was used to identify the misfitting student item‐score vectors. In the second stage, students’ verbal reports were collected to provide additional information about students’ response processes so as to reveal the actual causes of misfits. This two‐stage procedure helped to identify the misfits of item‐score vectors to the cognitive model used in the design and analysis of the diagnostic test, and to discover the reasons of misfits so that students’ problem‐solving strategies were better understood and their performances were interpreted in a more meaningful way.     

Feedback complexity and corrective efficiency

College undergraduates read a 2400-word passage, responded to 16 multiple-choice questions, and received one of four types of feedback following their responses. Complexity of feedback was inversely related to both error correctability and criterion efficiency taken as a ratio of feedback study time to post-test corrects. The results were discussed in terms of depth of processing and instructional comprehension.