"Interesting and provocative" summarizes the papers presented at the semi-annual Midwest Objective Measurement Seminar (MOMS), held on Friday, June 1st, 1990 at the University of Chicago, with the able and amiable Ben Wright as Chair.
Mike Seltzer and Ken Frank showed how the "Fourth Grade Slump" in reading skills, widely reported by users of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, is a figment of deficient measurement procedures. They demonstrated that inadequate test equating, combined with non-linear "grade equivalent" (GE) scaling, necessarily produces incorrect results. In Chicago, rather than a slump, there has been a slight Fourth Grade "surge"! Worse, when GEs are mistakenly regarded as measures, students appear to become more different in test performance at higher grades, when, in fact, they become more similar.
The application of Rasch techniques to a variety of measurement problems was described including Artistic Judgment (Dave Schroeder), Medical Patient Tracking (William Fisher), Computer-Adaptive Testing (Betty Bergstrom), Political Participation (Filemon Cerda) and Job Performance (Terry Schumacher).
Ron Zybura discussed the development of a test of prepositional knowledge among retarded children, aimed at improving the assessment and thus instruction of the retarded. His concern was to realize empirically a developmentally-based rating scale which included conceptually important preposition differences rarely observable in the general population. But rarely observed categories "disorder" the step threshold calibrations. Since intellectual development among the retarded is slower, such categories have a greater opportunity to be observed and so can be more clearly seen as developmental stages.
"The sociology of knowledge has now brought us to recognize that scholars
themselves have systems of values of which they should be fully conscious,
and that when they are so aware they are better equipped to see that to
omit the question of authority, ancient or modern, for their work is to
fall short of being fully scientific."
James A. Sanders in Canon and Community, 1984, Philadelphia, Fortress
Press, p. 21
Ideas from MOMS, June 1990, J Linacre Rasch Measurement Transactions, 1990, 4:2 p. 106
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