In this book, we review many examples of multimedia item types for testing. We also outline how games can be used to test physics concepts — discuss designing chemistry item types with interactive graphics; study how culture-specific linguistics can help inner-city kids and new immigrants...

Item response theory is a set of models and methods allowing for the analysis of binary or ordinal variables (items) that are influenced by a latent variable or latent trait- that is, a variable that cannot be measured directly. The theory was originally developed in educational assessment but...

Labor economists regularly regress educational achievement scores on covariates to examine what aects achievement. I discuss the mea surement and interpretation of achievement scores, and argue that, as the scores are typically measured on an ordinal scale, their analysis in terms of higher...

In assessing criminality, researchers have used counts of crimes, arrests, and so on, because interval measures were not available. Additionally, crime seriousness varies depending on demographic factors. This study examined the Crime and Violence Scale (CVS) regarding psychometric quality using...

Economists regularly regress IQ scores or achievement test scores on covariates, for example to evaluate educational policy. These test scores are ordinal measures, and their distributions can take an arbitrary shape, even though they are often constructed to look normal. The ordinality of test...