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Comparing Item Characteristic Curves

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Paul R. Rosenbaum
Paul R. Rosenbaum*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
*
Requests for reprints should be sent to Paul R. Rosenbaum, Statistics Department, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6302.
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Abstract

Test items are often evaluated and compared by contrasting the shapes of their item characteristics curves (ICC's) or surfaces. The current paper develops and applies three general (i.e., nonparametric) comparisons of the shapes of two item characteristic surfaces: (i) proportional latent odds, (ii) uniform relative difficulty, and (iii) item sensitivity. Two items may be compared in these ways while making no assumption about the shapes of item characteristic surfaces for other items, and no assumption about the dimensionality of the latent variable. Also studied is a method for comparing the relative shapes of two item characteristic curves in two examinee populations.

Keywords

item response theorylatent variable modelslatent class modelsbinary datadiscrete datacontingency tablesprobability inequalities
Type
Original Paper
Information
Psychometrika , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , March 1987 , pp. 217 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 The Psychometric Society

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Footnotes

The author is grateful to Paul Holland, Robert Mislevy, Tue Tjur, Rebecca Zwick, the editor and reviewers for valuable comments on the subject of this paper, to Mari A. Pearlman for advice on the pairing of items in the examples, and to Dorothy Thayer for assistance with computing.

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