Kibble JD, Johnson T. Are faculty predictions or item taxonomies useful for estimating the outcome of multiple-choice examinations? Adv Physiol Educ 35: 396–401, 2011; doi:10.1152/advan.00062.2011.—The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether multiple-choice item difficulty could be predicted either by a subjective judgment by the question author or by applying a learning taxonomy to the i...

Measurement professionals cannot come to an agreement on the definition of the term „item fairness‟. In this paper a continuous measure of item unfairness is proposed. The more the unfairness measure deviates from zero, the less fair the item is. If the measure exceeds the cutoff value, the item is identified as definitely unfair. The new approach can identify unfair items that would not be ide...

OBJECTIVES Knowledge on clinical epidemiology is crucial to practice evidence-based medicine. We describe the development and validation of the Utrecht questionnaire on knowledge on Clinical epidemiology for Evidence-based Practice (U-CEP); an assessment tool to be used in the training of clinicians. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING The U-CEP was developed in two formats: two sets of 25 questions and...

We investigate short-term learning from hints and feedback in a Web-based physics tutoring system. Both the skill of students and the difficulty and discrimination of items were determined by applying item response theory IRT to the first answers of students who are working on for-credit homework items in an introductory Newtonian physics course. We show that after tutoring a shifted logistic i...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to develop a revised version of the clinical critical thinking skills test (CCTS) and to subsequently validate its performance. METHODS This study is a secondary analysis of the CCTS. Data were obtained from a convenience sample of 284 college students in June 2011. Thirty items were analyzed using item response theory and test reliability was assessed. T...

We report the first successful demonstration of a simultaneous, two-item same-different (S/D) discrimination by 6 pigeons, in which nonpictorial color and shape stimuli were used. This study was conducted because the majority of recently successful demonstrations of S/D discrimination in pigeons have employed displays with more than two items. Two pairs of stimulus items were simultaneously pre...