Use of different sources of information in maintaining standards: examples from the Netherlands

In the different tests and examinations that are used at a national level in the Netherlands, a variety of equating and linking procedures are applied to maintain assessment standards. This chapter presents an overview of potential sources of information that can be used in the standard setting of tests and examinations. Examples from test practices in the Netherlands are provided that apply some of these sources of information. This chapter discusses how the different sources of information are applied and aggregated to set the levels. It also discusses under which circumstances performance information of the population would be sufficient to set the levels and when additional information is necessar

Aspects of accountability and assessment in the Netherlands

This article describes aspects of test-based accountability in the Netherlands. It provides a description of the design of the Educational system in the Netherlands, it gives a short introduction to the role of the Dutch Inspectorate of Education in the accountability of schools and describes different assessments that are used as sources of information in the accountability system. For each assessment, the primary function in education and its role in the accountability system are discussed. Finally, the factors that can potentially influence the validity of the accountability indicators and the strong and weak points of the current system are identified and some directions are presented of potential developments of this system

Self-Monitoring Assessments for Educational Accountability Systems

Test-based accountability is now the cornerstone of U.S. education policy, and it is becoming more important in many other nations as well. Educators sometimes respond to test-based accountability in ways that produce score inflation. In the past, score inflation has usually been evaluated by comparing trends in scores on a high-stakes test to trends on a lower-stakes audit test. However, separate audit tests are often unavailable, and their use has several important drawbacks, such as potential bias from motivational differences. As an alternative, we propose self-monitoring assessments (SMAs) that incorporate audit components into operational high-stakes assessments. This paper provides a framework for designing SMAs. It describes five specific SMA designs that could be incorporated into the non-equivalent groups anchor test linking approaches used by most large-scale assessments and discusses analytical issues that would arise in their use

MCMC estimation of multidimensional IRT models

A Bayesian procedure to estimate the three-parameter normal ogive model and a generalization to a model with multidimensional ability parameters are discussed. The procedure is a generalization of a procedure by J. Albert (1992) for estimating the two-parameter normal ogive model. The procedure will support multiple samples from multiple populations and restrictions on the factor matrix for testing specific hypotheses about the ability structure. The technique is illustrated using simulated and real data. A Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedure is used to sample the posterior distributions of interest and needed chains are constructed using the Gibbs sampler (A. Gelfand and A. Smith, 1990)