Ideas from MOMS, June 1990

"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

Please help with Standard Dataset 4: Andrich Rating Scale Model

Rasch Publications
Rasch Measurement Transactions (free, online)	Rasch Measurement research papers (free, online)	Probabilistic Models for Some Intelligence and Attainment Tests, Georg Rasch	Applying the Rasch Model 3rd. Ed., Bond & Fox	Best Test Design, Wright & Stone
Rating Scale Analysis, Wright & Masters	Introduction to Rasch Measurement, E. Smith & R. Smith	Introduction to Many-Facet Rasch Measurement, Thomas Eckes	Invariant Measurement: Using Rasch Models in the Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences, George Engelhard, Jr.	Statistical Analyses for Language Testers, Rita Green
Rasch Models: Foundations, Recent Developments, and Applications, Fischer & Molenaar	Journal of Applied Measurement	Rasch models for measurement, David Andrich	Constructing Measures, Mark Wilson	Rasch Analysis in the Human Sciences, Boone, Stave, Yale
in Spanish:	Análisis de Rasch para todos, Agustín Tristán		Mediciones, Posicionamientos y Diagnósticos Competitivos, Juan Ramón Oreja Rodríguez

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