A flexible online platform for computerized adaptive testing

Abstract

Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) is a field of research originating in psychometrics that has been adopted in the last years for formative and summative assessment activities in educational settings in general and in online learning in particular. While a variety of platforms is available for designing and deploying CAT the challenge of providing the flexibility in test and item design required for domain-specific assessment formats in education has hardly been addressed so far. The present article introduces a software architecture to fill this gap and enable the development of fully customizable CAT tools with respect to domain-specific item design and visualization as well as deployed CAT algorithms. A prototypical implementation of the architecture and a set of domain-specific item types are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach and outline future directions of development and research.

Applying Computer Adaptive Testing Methods to Suicide Risk Screening in the Emergency Department

“…They also have a collection of scales for which they already built a CAT, which may be used for research purposes. For more details on available online platforms, refer to Oppl (). As the field is still rapidly developing, novel algorithms and software will continue to emerge.…”

A Calibrated Item Bank for Computerized Adaptive Testing in Measuring Science TIMSS Performance

“…Generally, if the student answered wrongly, an easier item will be given as the next item and vice versa. The item selection process will continue until the test meets its stopping rule and the student's ability level, refered to as theta value is reported in a logit unit (Oppl et al, 2017).…”

Evaluating Computerized Adaptive Testing Efficiency in Measuring Students’ Performance in Science TIMSS

“…In the second step, the examinee's response towards the item is analysed and his or her ability is estimated. CAT will repeat these two steps until it meets the test stopping rule when all the items have been used, the measurement's precision level has been achieved or the test has reached its maximum testing time (Oppl et al, 2017). During the test, if the examinee answers wrongly, an easier item will be selected by the computer as the next item and if the examinee answers correctly, a more difficult item will be selected.…”

“…The web-based platform enables the CAT to be administered online. According to Oppl et al (2017), there are three criteria in choosing the best testing platform for CAT. Those criteria are (1) the platform offers various testing strategies; (2) the platform offers various item selection methods; and (3) the platform offers various test stopping rules.…”