Investigating The Effect of Exposure-Control Strategies on Item Selection Methods in MCAT

Year 2018, Volume: 9 Issue: 3, 295 - 311, 29.09.2018

Xiuzhen Mao Burhanettin Ozdemır , Yating Wang Tao Xın

https://doi.org/10.21031/epod.407521

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the
effect of different item exposure controlling strategies on item selection
methods in the context of multidimensional computerized adaptive testing
(MCAT).  Additionally, this study aims to
examine to what extend the restrictive threshold (RT) and the restrictive
progressive (RPG) exposure methods suppress the item exposure rates and
increase the exposure rates of underexposed items without losing psychometric
precision in MCAT.  For this purpose, the
performance of four item selection methods with and without exposure controls
are evaluated and compared so as to determine how results differ when item
exposure controlling strategies are applied with Monte-Carlo simulation method.
The four item selection methods employed in this study are D-optimality,
Kullback–Leibler information (KLP), the minimized error variance of linear
combination score with equal weight (V1), the composite score with optimized
weight (V2). On the other hand, the maximum priority index (MPI) method proposed
for unidimensional CAT and two other item exposure control methods, that are RT
and RPG methods proposed for cognitive diagnostic CAT, are adopted. The results
show that: (1) KLP, D-optimality, and V1 performed better in recovering domain
scores, and all outperformed V2 with respect to precision; (2) although V1 and
V2 offer improved item bank usage rates, 
KLP, D-optimality, V1, and V2 produced an unbalanced distribution of
item exposure rates; (3) all exposure control strategies improve the exposure
uniformity greatly and with very little loss in psychometric precision; (4) RPG
and MPI perform similarly in exposure control, and outperformed RT exposure
control method.

Keywords

Multidimensional Computerized Adaptive Testing, Item Selection Methods, exposure control strategies

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