OBJECTIVE To describe the development and psychometric properties of the Spinal Cord Injury--Quality of Life (SCI-QOL) Bladder Management Difficulties and Bowel Management Difficulties item banks and Bladder Complications scale. DESIGN Using a mixed-methods design, a pool of items assessing bladder and bowel-related concerns were developed using focus groups with individuals with spinal cord ...

This study was an attemptto provide detailed information of the strengths and weaknesses of test takers‟ real ability through cognitive diagnostic assessment, and to detect differential item functioning in each test item. The rationale for using CDA was that it estimates an item‟s discrimination power, whereas clas- sical test theory or item response theory depicts between rather within item mu...

Item reliability is of special interest for Mokken’s nonparametric item response theory, and is useful for the evaluation of item quality in nonparametric test construction research. It is also of interest for nonparametric person-fit analysis. Three methods for the estimation of the reliability of single dichotomous items are discussed. All methods are based on the assumptions of nondecreasing...

An instance of the classical bin packing problem consists of a positive real C and a list L = (a1, a2, ..., an) of items with sizes 0 < s(ai) ≤ C, 1 ≤ i ≤ n; a solution to the problem is a partition of L into a minimum number of blocks, called bins, such that the sum of the sizes of the items in each bin is at most the capacity C. The capacity is just a scaling parameter; as is customary, we pu...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats promised Thursday to speed an economic recovery package through Congress, but vowed to rearrange President Bush’s budget proposal to ben­ efit m iddle-income Americans, not the rich. “ Democrats w ill not obstruct, but we w ill try to improve the p re s id e n t’s p acka ge ,” sa id House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., as the Budget Committee began hearings...

AIMS To evaluate the underlying factor structure of the Chinese version of General Health Questionnaire-12 using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses in Chinese adolescents and find out which factor model proposed by previous empirical research is the best-fit model. BACKGROUND The 12-item General Health Questionnaire has been extensively used with adolescents in the West. Yet, it has...

Two simulation studies were conducted to investigate the effects of the practice of item parceling. In Study 1, unidimensional sets of normally and nonnormally distributed item-level data were categorized into 2-, 3-, and 4-item parcels. Analyses revealed that the use of item parcels resulted in better fitting solutions, as measured by the root mean squared error of approximation (RMSEA), compa...

A crucial point regarding the development and calibration of an aptitude test is the presence of missing values. In most test administrations, examinees omit individual items even in high-stakes tests. The most common procedure for treating these missing values in data analysis is to score these responses as incorrect; however, an alternative would be to consider omitted responses as if they we...