Advances in Measurement in Educational Research and Assessment

Since the early 1960s there have been substantial developments in the field of measurement in education and psychology. The application of these developments to problems in educational and psychological research was, until the mid 1980s, limited to those research workers and graduate students who had ready access to a powerful mainframe computer, with the appropiate programs installed. In the 1990s most researchers and graduate students in education have access to a high specification computer, with versatile and user-friendly and readily available programs that can tackle a wide range of measurement problems in educational and psychological research that were formerly intractable. This volume presents the advances that have occurred in educational measurement, and puts them into perspective. It also discusses the ongoing quest for improved measurement and looks at the substantial developments that are likely to continue to occur in the future. In addition, the volume presents concisely, the important theoretical ideas that underpin these new developments and refers the reader to other more detailed information resources. In the concluding section the specific procedures that have been developed to cover a wide range of research problems are presented. These procedures are linked together so that they may be seen to represent a family of strategies rather than separate and discrete approaches. While emphasis in the volume is placed on the Rasch model, because of its very powerful measurement properties, it is clearly recognized that there is a range of different strategies that might be employed, and the meaningfulness of the different approaches will only emerge from experience in the use of these procedures. As a consequence no one procedure is endorsed over and above the others.