New Automated Test Assembly Method And Its Application In Parallel Tests Generation Based On Item Response Theory

Many studies suggest that large-scale assessments need to generate multiple parallel test forms to administrate them at different times and places,so that to ensure test safety and test fairness.In educational and psychological measurement,parallel test forms need to be generated in order to make the comparability of the results or meet theof reliability estimation.Based on the item response theory model,for parallel test forms,each parallel test form is not only basically the same in content structure,but also in terms of statistical structure.Therefore,it is very important to be able to generate multiple parallel tests and to ensure the quality of test forms.In Computerized Adaptive Testing(CAT),a method based on the Maximum Priority Index Method(MPI)has been used for test construction.At present,many researches and applications of the MPI method is to find matching questions from the question bank according to the order of the questions of the seed test paper and generate parallel tests.Such item matching methods have certain limitations.In addition,the mixed integer linear programming method is mostly used to generate multiple parallel test forms.Therefore,in the case of a given item bank and test specifications,it is very meaningful to consider improving the MPI method from the parallel test quality index and comparing it with the mixed integer linear programming method.This paper improves the matching rules of the MPI method and proposes a new MPI method.The first study aims to solve its limitations based on the existing single item matching rules,by optimizing the single item matching rules from the direction of the item matching order,and propose a single item matching MPI method that considers the item matching order for test paper formation.And compared with the original MPI method.In the second study,a new MPI method is proposed,which matches the two items of the seed test with the two items of the item bank to increase the problem solving space for generating test forms,and compares with the original MPI method.In the third study,the improved two item matching MPI method and mixed integer linear programming method were used to generate parallel test forms respectively,and the quality of parallel test forms was compared to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the method.Given the item bank and test forms quality evaluation criteria,the paper comprehensively considers the structure of item bank,the structure of seed test and other influencing factors,and introduces the common used test specifications to evaluate the quality of parallel test forms constructed by different methods under the condition of the fixed number of parallel test forms.The simulation results of the first study show that the improved single item matching MPI method can effectively improve the quality of parallel test forms compared with the original MPI method.In most cases,the quality of the parallel test forms generated by the improved single item matching MPI method is better than that generated by the original MPI method.The simulation experimental results of the second study show that the improved two item matching MPI method can effectively improve the quality of parallel test forms compared with the original MPI method.In most cases,the quality of parallel forms generated by the improved MPI method is better than that generated by the original MPI method.The simulation results of the third study show that the quality of parallel test forms generated by the improved MPI method is closed to that generated by MILP method.