Item Pool Design and Maintenance for Multistage Testing

Multistage testing (MST) designs are becoming more popular in largescale educational measurement programs. One of the great advantages of MST is that, like in computerized adaptive testing (CAT), test difficulty can be adapted to the level of the candidate. MST designs can vary with respect to the number of stages, the number of modules per stage, the number of items per module, and the paths candidates can follow between stages (see chapter 1 and Luecht and Nungester 1998). To illustrate the components of an MST design, an example is shown in Figure 3.1.