Product Description
Item response theory has become an essential component in the toolkit of every researcher in the behavioral sciences. It provides a powerful means to study individual responses to a variety of stimuli, and the methodology has been extended and developed to cover many different models of interaction. This volume presents a wide-ranging handbook to item response theory - and its applications to educational and psychological testing. It will serve as both an introduction to the subject and also as a comprehensive reference volume for practitioners and researchers. It is organized into six major sections: the nominal categories model, models for response time or multiple attempts on items, models for multiple abilities or cognitive components, nonparametric models, models for nonmonotone items, and models with special assumptions. Each chapter in the book has been written by an expert of that particular topic, and the chapters have been carefully edited to ensure that! a uniform style of notation and presentation is used throughout. As a result, all researchers whose work uses item response theory will find this an indispensable companion to their work and it will be the subject's reference volume for many years to come.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 3 reviews)

A comprehensive look at IRT circa mid 90s

This edited volume provides synoptic chapters on the field of item response models. Nearly every variant of model--there were a lot then, more now--gets a chapter, usually written by one of the most prominent names associated with the model. For instance, R. Darrell Bock wrote the chapter on nominal models. The writing is generally clear and notation is consistent, as another reviewer noted. However... the field has changed a lot in the intervening time since publication. This book represents an overview of "state of the art" circa the mid 1990s. If you need an introduction to a lot of models, it's good since those haven't changed, even though many have been added. However, you still see things like joint maximum likelihood estimation (JMLE) seriously discussed and there is, if I recall correctly, no mention of MCMC methods or of the more "modern" view of IRT as a generalized linear mixed model, discussed in books like the volume edited by Paul de Boeck and Mark Wilson (2004), Explanatory Item Response Models.

At publication, this would have been *****, but it loses one due to age.
December 21, 2007

A Comprehenstive Account of Item Response Theory

The book, edited by van der Linden and Hambleton, is a comprehensive
account of Item Response Theory. The "modern" in the title of the
book is indeed reflected in new developments such as nonparametric
models and mixture models. The audience of the book is targeted
toward those who want to further develop models around Item Response
Theory. People who are more interested in applying IRT may prefer
books like Applying the Rasch Model: Fundamental Measurement in the Human Sciences.

Although the book was contributed by multiple authors, the two editors
indeed made efforts making notation consistent and the structure of
every chapter similar (Introduction, Model Description, Parameter
Estimation, Examples, References), which is very important for readers
like me who don't follow the book from cover to cover.
April 30, 2007

Gift in the field of Educational Measurement

This book is realy a gift for those persons who are working in educational Measurement.
December 14, 1999

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Polytomous Item Response Theory Models (Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences)
by Remo Ostini, Michael L. Nering

Item Response Theory: Parameter Estimation Techniques, Second Edition (Statistics: a Series of Textbooks and Monogrphs)
by Frank B. Baker, Seock-Ho Kim

Test Equating, Scaling, and Linking: Methods and Practices (Statistics for Social and Behavioral Sciences)
by Michael J. Kolen, Robert L. Brennan

Item Response Theory for Psychologists (Multivariate Applications Book Series.)
by Susan E. Embretson, Steven P. Reise

Explanatory Item Response Models: A Generalized Linear and Nonlinear Approach (Statistics for Social and Behavioral Sciences)
by Paul De Boeck, Mark Wilson