Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement. Psychometrics generally covers specialized fields within psychology and education devoted to testing,measurement,assessment,and related activities. Psychometrics is concerned with the objective measurement of latent constructs that cannot be directly observed. Examples of latent constructs include intelligence,introversion,mental disorders,and educational achievement. The levels of individuals on nonobservable latent variables are inferred through mathematical modeling based on what is observed from individuals' responses to items on tests and scales.
A standardized test is a test that is administered and scored in a consistent,or "standard",manner. Standardized tests are designed in such a way that the questions and interpretations are consistent and are administered and scored in a predetermined,standard manner.
The Graduate Management Admission Test is a computer adaptive test (CAT) intended to assess certain analytical,quantitative,verbal,and data literacy skills for use in admission to a graduate management program,such as a Master of Business Administration (MBA) program. Answering the test questions requires reading comprehension,and mathematical skills such as arithmetic,and algebra. The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) owns and operates the test,and states that the GMAT assesses critical thinking and problem-solving abilities while also addressing data analysis skills that it believes to be vital to real-world business and management success. It can be taken up to five times a year but no more than eight times total. Attempts must be at least 16 days apart.
Educational Testing Service (ETS),founded in 1947,is the world's largest private educational testing and assessment organization. It is headquartered in Lawrence Township,New Jersey,but has a Princeton address.
Educational assessment or educational evaluation is the systematic process of documenting and using empirical data on the knowledge,skill,attitudes,aptitude and beliefs to refine programs and improve student learning. Assessment data can be obtained by examining student work directly to assess the achievement of learning outcomes or it is based on data from which one can make inferences about learning. Assessment is often used interchangeably with test but is not limited to tests. Assessment can focus on the individual learner,the learning community,a course,an academic program,the institution,or the educational system as a whole. The word "assessment" came into use in an educational context after the Second World War.
Computerized adaptive testing (CAT) is a form of computer-based test that adapts to the examinee's ability level. For this reason,it has also been called tailored testing. In other words,it is a form of computer-administered test in which the next item or set of items selected to be administered depends on the correctness of the test taker's responses to the most recent items administered.
Lee Joseph Cronbach was an American educational psychologist who made contributions to psychological testing and measurement.
Language learning aptitude refers to the "prediction of how well,relative to other individuals,an individual can learn a foreign language in a given amount of time and under given conditions". Foreign language aptitude itself has been defined as a set of cognitive abilities which predicts L2 learning rate,or how fast learners can increase their proficiency in a second or foreign language,and L2 ultimate attainment,or how close learners will get to being able to communicate like a native in a second or foreign language,both in classroom and real-world situations. Understanding aptitude is crucial for a complete picture of the process of second language acquisition. Knowledge about language aptitude has profound impacts in the field of Applied Linguistics,particularly in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory and in the practice of teaching and learning languages.
Holistic grading or holistic scoring,in standards-based education,is an approach to scoring essays using a simple grading structure that bases a grade on a paper's overall quality. This type of grading,which is also described as nonreductionist grading,contrasts with analytic grading,which takes more factors into account when assigning a grade. Holistic grading can also be used to assess classroom-based work. Rather than counting errors,a paper is judged holistically and often compared to an anchor paper to evaluate if it meets a writing standard. It differs from other methods of scoring written discourse in two basic ways. It treats the composition as a whole,not assigning separate values to different parts of the writing. And it uses two or more raters,with the final score derived from their independent scores. Holistic scoring has gone by other names:"non-analytic," "overall quality," "general merit," "general impression," "rapid impression." Although the value and validation of the system are a matter of debate,holistic scoring of writing is still in wide application.
A computerized classification test (CCT) refers to,as its name would suggest,a Performance Appraisal System that is administered by computer for the purpose of classifying examinees. The most common CCT is a mastery test where the test classifies examinees as "Pass" or "Fail," but the term also includes tests that classify examinees into more than two categories. While the term may generally be considered to refer to all computer-administered tests for classification,it is usually used to refer to tests that are interactively administered or of variable-length,similar to computerized adaptive testing (CAT). Like CAT,variable-length CCTs can accomplish the goal of the test with a fraction of the number of items used in a conventional fixed-form test.
Curriculum-based measurement,or CBM,is also referred to as a general outcomes measures (GOMs) of a student's performance in either basic skills or content knowledge.
The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) is an international non-profit organization of business schools that provides products and services to academic institutions and prospective graduate management education students. The organization owns the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT),a standardized assessment that is widely used by graduate business administration programs to measure quantitative,verbal,analytical and integrated reasoning skills in applicants.
Educational measurement refers to the use of educational assessments and the analysis of data such as scores obtained from educational assessments to infer the abilities and proficiencies of students. The approaches overlap with those in psychometrics. Educational measurement is the assigning of numerals to traits such as achievement,interest,attitudes,aptitudes,intelligence and performance.
Teacher quality assessment commonly includes reviews of qualifications,tests of teacher knowledge,observations of practice,and measurements of student learning gains. Assessments of teacher quality are currently used for policymaking,employment and tenure decisions,teacher evaluations,merit pay awards,and as data to inform the professional growth of teachers.
Automated essay scoring (AES) is the use of specialized computer programs to assign grades to essays written in an educational setting. It is a form of educational assessment and an application of natural language processing. Its objective is to classify a large set of textual entities into a small number of discrete categories,corresponding to the possible grades,for example,the numbers 1 to 6. Therefore,it can be considered a problem of statistical classification.
Writing assessment refers to an area of study that contains theories and practices that guide the evaluation of a writer's performance or potential through a writing task. Writing assessment can be considered a combination of scholarship from composition studies and measurement theory within educational assessment. Writing assessment can also refer to the technologies and practices used to evaluate student writing and learning. An important consequence of writing assessment is that the type and manner of assessment may impact writing instruction,with consequences for the character and quality of that instruction.
Automatic item generation (AIG),or automated item generation,is a process linking psychometrics with computer programming. It uses a computer algorithm to automatically create test items that are the basic building blocks of a psychological test. The method was first described by John R. Bormuth in the 1960s but was not developed until recently. AIG uses a two-step process:first,a test specialist creates a template called an item model;then,a computer algorithm is developed to generate test items. So,instead of a test specialist writing each individual item,computer algorithms generate families of items from a smaller set of parent item models. More recently,neural networks,including Large Language Models,such as the GPT family,have been used successfully for generating items automatically.
Randy Elliot Bennett is an American educational researcher who specializes in educational assessment. He is currently the Norman O. Frederiksen Chair in Assessment Innovation at Educational Testing Service in Princeton,NJ. His research and writing focus on bringing together advances in cognitive science,technology,and measurement to improve teaching and learning. He received the ETS Senior Scientist Award in 1996,the ETS Career Achievement Award in 2005,the Teachers College,Columbia University Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016,Fellow status in the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 2017,the National Council on Measurement in Education's (NCME) Bradley Hanson Award for Contributions to Educational Measurement in 2019,the E. F. Lindquist Award from AERA and ACT in 2020,elected membership in the National Academy of Education in 2022,and the AERA Cognition and Assessment Special Interest Group Outstanding Contribution to Research in Cognition and Assessment Award in 2024. Randy Bennett was elected President of both the International Association for Educational Assessment (IAEA),a worldwide organization primarily constituted of governmental and NGO measurement organizations,and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME),whose members are employed in universities,testing organizations,state and federal education departments,and school districts.
Mark Daniel Reckase is an educational psychologist and expert on quantitative methods and measurement who is known for his work on computerized adaptive testing,multidimensional item response theory,and standard setting in educational and psychological tests. Reckase is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the College of Education at Michigan State University.
Matthias von Davier is a psychometrician,academic,inventor,and author. He is the executive director of the TIMSS &PIRLS International Study Center at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development and the J. Donald Monan,S.J.,University Professor in Education at Boston College.
