Thursday, February 10, 2005

Have a rest today...

Most people think of pioneers as the people with the arrows in their backs. They also happen to be the people with all the land

posted by Shunkai Fu @ 9:12 PM 0 comments

Monday, February 07, 2005

Dimensionality?!

I don't know when we began talked about Unidimensionality in measurement. I guess that the direct cause to it is that we, in an simple way, thought that one dimension was easier to process. With time on, we notice multidimensionality hidden in the application. But how can we determine between them to which one problem belongs. For example, a mathematics exam written in English will be unidimensional for English-spoken examinees, but at least 2 dimensions for Chinese students. Here, I prefer the view of Mark Reckase and Terry Ackerman, who stressed that the dimensionality lies in the interaction between the test structure (given by the item response functions; i.e., IRFs) and the latent ability structure (given by the latent ability examinee population distribution).

posted by Shunkai Fu @ 6:26 PM 7 comments

Where do problems come from about measurement and assessment

As professor William Stout, founder of Educational Measurement Lab in UIUC, stated, promsing problems in measurement and assessment field can only come from hurly-burly practical world. It is not a big surprise. Before we have an ideal or perfect model about ourselves, not only the hidden aspects, but the explicit processing approach of collected data, the only way to enable us more perfect is to notice and solve what problems be met during our applications. Psychometrics is not purely abstract field, and its development depends on solvement of one problem after another although the method used to solve the problem maybe abstract mathematics

posted by Shunkai Fu @ 5:19 PM 0 comments