Education Commons^™

The Role Of Learning Progressions In Global Scales, Ray Adams

Professor Ray Adams

Learning progressions are valuable tools for the international assessment community. Ray Adams reports.

Development Of Reporting Scales For Reading And Mathematics: A Report Describing The Process For Building The Uis Reporting Scales, Ross Turner, Ray Adams, Ursula Schwantner, Dan Cloney, Claire Scoular, Prue Anderson, Alexander Daraganov, Jen Jackson, Sandra Knowles, Gayl O'Connor, Pam Munro-Smith, Stavroula Zoumboulis, Pauline Rogers

Professor Ray Adams

As a technical partner of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, ACER-GEM has created reporting scales for reading and maths, with the intention of enabling countries to examine and report the outcomes of their assessment activities using a common framework. This report gives the theoretical and contextual background to the scales, and describes the steps in the drafting process.

Educational Progress For All, Ray Adams

Professor Ray Adams

ACER’s ongoing work in global educational monitoring is supporting educational progress for all learners, worldwide, as Ray Adams explains.

Data To Inform Policy, Ray Adams

Professor Ray Adams

The ACER Centre for Global Education Monitoring supports the monitoring of educational outcomes worldwide. Ray Adams explains how the Centre’s systematic and strategic collection of data on educational outcomes, and factors related to those outcomes, can be used to inform policy aimed at improving educational progress for all learners.

Evaluation Of Item Parameter Recovery Estimation By Acer Conquest Software, Luc T. Le, Ray Adams

Professor Ray Adams

ACER ConQuest (Adams, Wu, and Wilson, 2012) has been popularly used for analysing testing and assessment data. Two of the most common estimation methods for Rasch measurement models (Rasch, 1960/1980) are available in this software, marginal maximum likelihood estimation (MML) and joint maximum likelihood estimation (JML). This study is concerned with item parameter recovery for the dichotomous Rasch model. Our primary focus is on comparing JML and MML when the assumptions of MML are violated, that is the abilities are not sampled from the distribution that is assumed in the estimation.

On The Use Of Rotated Context Questionnaires In Conjunction With Multilevel Item Response Models, Raymond Adams, Petra Lietz, Alla Berezner

Professor Ray Adams

Background: While rotated test booklets have been employed in large-scale assessments to increase the content coverage of the assessments, rotation has not yet been applied to the context questionnaires administered to respondents.

Methods: This paper describes the development of a methodology that uses rotated context questionnaires in conjunction with multilevel item response models and plausible values. In order to examine the impact of this methodology on the continuity of the results, PISA 2006 data for nine heterogeneous countries were rescaled after having been restructured to simulate the outcomes of the use of different rotated context questionnaire designs.

Results: Results revealed …

The Estimation Of Polytomous Item Response Models With Many Dimensions, Nikolai Volodin, Ray J. Adams

Professor Ray Adams

Identification conditions and an improved estimation method for a D-dimensional mixed coefficients multinomial logit model are discussed. This model is a generalisation of the Adams and Wilson (1997) random coefficients multinomial logit and it can be used to fit multdimensional forms of a wide range of Rasch measurement models. The computational demands of the numerical integration required in fitting such models have limited previous implementations to three and perhaps four-dimensional problems (Glas, 1992; Adams, Wilson and Wang, 1997). This paper illustrates a Monte Carlo integration method that permits the estimation of models with much higher dimensionality. The example in this …

Accuracy Of Rasch Model Item Parameter Estimation, Luc T. Le, Ray J. Adams

Professor Ray Adams

This study used Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the item parameter recovery from ACER ConQuest 3 software (Adams, Wu, & Wilson, 2012) for the dichotomous Rasch model. The authors’ primary focus was the comparison of its estimation methods, joint maximum likelihood (JML), marginal maximum likelihood (MML) with a normal distribution assumption and MML with a discrete distributions assumption when the populations were in fact non-normal. The simulation data sets were generated with two test lengths (10 and 50 items) and four alternative true population distributions for the abilities: normal, bimodal, uniform, and chi-square. As expected, results showed that MML-Normal was …

National Partnership Agreement On Literacy And Numeracy : Performance Report For 2010, Ray Adams, Mike Long, Paul Mcclintock

Professor Ray Adams

The COAG Reform Council must independently assess whether Australian jurisdictions have met pre-determined milestones and performance benchmarks contained in the National Partnership on Literacy and Numeracy before reward funding is paid. This report assesses state and territory performance for 2010. Part A describes the National Partnership; Part B devotes a chapter to each jurisdiction's assessment; and Part C suggests improvements to the performance reporting framework.

Pisa 2000 Technical Report, Ray Adams (Ed), Margaret Wu (Ed)

Professor Ray Adams

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was launched by the OECD to provide internationally comparable evidence on student performance. This technical report is the product of a collaborative effort between the countries participating in PISA and the experts and the institutions working within the framework of the International PISA Consortium.