Recent Developments in Measurement and Possible Applications to the Measurement of Psychomotor Behavior

Abstract

The relatively recent development and successful implementation of item response theory, or IRT for the solutions to measurement problems in the cognitive and affective behavior domains should provide the incentive for physical educators to begin to apply IRT procedures to mental test data and opinion or attitude measurements in the near future. IRT offers distinct advantages to the measurement of these behaviors that the more traditional, classical procedures either cannot provide or cannot provide easily. The primary advantage of IRT procedures is to be able to obtain an estimate of the examinee's true but unknown ability (i.e., the latent trait of interest) and to estimate this ability in such a way that this estimate does not depend on other examinees or on the particular test administered. These are the so-called invariance principles of IRT, making it possible to design tests specifically for the estimation of the ability of a given examinee. These adaptive tests provide estimates of abilities much more efficiently than traditional fixed-length, fixed-item tests. The question that remains, however, is “Can IRT procedures and adaptive testing be used in the measurement of behaviors from the psychomotor domain?” Possible models which could be used to estimate latent abilities in this domain are given, but some caveats are considered. These include whether or not IRT assumptions might be violated if these procedures are applied to psychomotor skills, and perhaps more importantly, whether or not the measurement of these skills would be enhanced with the application of these developments.

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