Abstract
Switching a testing program from a linear to an adaptive format increases its efficiency considerably. The gain in efficiency can be used to shorten the length of the test or increase the accuracy of the scores. The gain is especially relevant to testing programs in which a battery of tests has to be administered in a single session but the testing time has to remain feasible. Examples of such programs are diagnostic testing for instructional purposes (e.g., Boughton, Yao, & Lewis 2006; Yao & Boughton, 2007) and large-scale assessments of education. These programs generally involve the reporting of profiles of scores of students, schools, or districts. In order to use such profiles for decision making, each of their individual scores should have satisfactory accuracy. The more advantageous combination of testing time and score accuracy made possible by the use of a battery of adaptive instead of linear tests has been highlighted earlier, for instance, in Brown and Weiss (1977) and Giallucca andWeiss (1979).
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van der Linden, W.J. (2009). Sequencing an Adaptive Test Battery. In: van der Linden, W., Glas, C. (eds) Elements of Adaptive Testing. Statistics for Social and Behavioral Sciences. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-85461-8_5
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