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A Theory of Consistency of Ordering Generalizable to Tailored Testing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Norman Cliff*
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
*
Requests for reprints should be sent to Norman Cliff, Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, University Park, Los Angeles, California 90007.

Abstract

Measures of consistency and completeness of order relations derived from test-type data are proposed. The measures are generalized to apply to incomplete data such as from tailored testing. The measures are based on consideration of the items-plus-persons by items-plus-persons matrix as an adjacency matrix in which a 1 means that the row element, whether item or person, dominated the column element. From this the number of item-item and person-person dominance relations can be derived. Indices of consistency are developed which compare the number of dominance relations in a matrix to the number that would occur if it were perfectly consistent and to the number in a random matrix; relations to other indices are noted.

Type
Original Paper
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 The Psychometric Society

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Footnotes

The research reported here was supported by the Office of Naval Research, Contract N00014-75-C-0684, NR150-373. The author wishes to thank Dr. Thomas J. Reynolds for a number of helpful discussions of this material.

References

Reference Note

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