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The Role of Psychometric Modeling in Test Validation for the MKT Measures: An Application of Multidimensional Item Response Theory

Abstract

"One of the key challenges facing psychometrics as a discipline is demonstrating its relevance with regards to substantive issues in educational and psychological research. One problem is that psychometric modeling has long been considered part of reliability analysis, which has traditionally been considered separately from test validation. However, this separation can be viewed as artificial (Marcoulides, 2004) and we believe that test validation must necessarily employ psychometric modeling to investigate key assumptions and inferences. Such an investigation intimately connects psychometric modeling to substantive concerns and provides a gateway for the relevance of psychometrics in educational and psychological research. In this paper we examine the role of item response theory (IRT), particularly multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) in test validation from a validity argument perspective."