A Non-technical Approach for Illustrating Item Response Theory

Since the introduction of the No Child Left Behind Act, assessment has become a pre-dominant theme in the US K-12 system. However, making assessment results understandable and usable for the K-12 teachers has been a challenge. While test technology offered by various vendors has been widely implemented, technology of training for test development seems to be underdeveloped. The objective of this presentation is to illustrate a well-designed interactive tutorial for understanding the complex concepts of Item Response Theory (IRT). The approach of this tutorial is to dissociate IRT from Classical Test Theory (CTT) because it is the belief of the authors that the mis-analogy between IRT and CTT could lead to misconceptions. Initial user feedback is collected as input for further refining the program.