A Procedure for Decision Making Using Tailored Testing

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a decision procedure that operates sequentially and can easily be applied to tailored testing without loss of any of the elegance and mathematical sophistication of the examination procedures. In applying the decision procedure, two specific item response theory (IRT) models are used: the one- and three-parameter logistic models. Although any other IRT model could just as easily have been used, these models were selected because of their frequent appearance in the research literature and because of the existence of readily available calibration programs and tailored testing programs. The purposes of this research were (1) to obtain information on how the sequential probability ratio test (SPRT) procedure functioned when items were not randomly sampled from the item pool; (2) to gain experience in selecting the bounds of the indifference region; and (3) to obtain information on the effects of guessing on the accuracy of classification when the one-parameter logistic model was used. To determine the effects of these variables, the computation of the SPRT was programmed into both the one- and three-parameter logistic tailored testing procedures that were operational at the University of Missouri—Columbia.