The effectiveness of confirmatory factor analytic (CFA) and item response theory (IRT) methods of assessing measurement invariance were investigated using simulated data with a known lack of invariance. Across all study conditions, IRT likelihood ratio (LR) tests consistently outperformed both CFA and IRT differential functioning of items and tests (DFIT) analyses in terms of detecting a lack o...

INTRODUCTION The Health Assessment Questionnaire Disability Index (HAQ) and the SF-36 PF-10, among other instruments, yield sensitive and valid Disability (Physical Function) endpoints. Modern techniques, such as Item Response Theory (IRT), now enable development of more precise instruments using improved items. The NIH Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) is charge...

Illegal hunting (poaching) is a global threat to wildlife. Anti-poaching initiatives are making increasing use of technology, such as infrared thermography (IRT), to support traditional foot and vehicle patrols. To date, the effectiveness of IRT for poacher location has not been tested under field conditions, where thermal signatures are often complex. Here, we test the hypothesis that IRT will...

We introduce Item Response Theory (IRT) from psychometrics as an alternative to majority voting to create an IRT gold standard (GSIRT ). IRT describes characteristics of individual items in GSIRT their difficulty and discriminating power and is able to account for these characteristics in its estimation of human intelligence or ability for an NLP task. In this paper, we evaluated IRT’s model-fi...

The growing emphasis on patient-centered care has accelerated the demand for high-quality data from patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures. Traditionally, the development and validation of these measures has been guided by classical test theory. However, item response theory (IRT), an alternate measurement framework, offers promise for addressing practical measurement problems found in health-...

This study compares the psychometric utility of Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Item Response Theory (IRT) for scale construction with data from higher education student surveys. Using 2008 Your First College Year (YFCY) survey data from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, two scales are built and tested—one measuring social involve...

The maintenance of a good surgical view is mandatory in video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS). For routine segmentectomy, it is necessary to re-inflate the lung in order to identify the intersegmental borders. However, such re-inflation can occasionally obstruct the surgical view and can lead to prolongation of operation time, particularly in the context of VATS. Infrared thoracoscopy( IR...

Item response theory (IRT) has become a popular methodological framework for modeling response data from assessments in education and health; however, its use is not widespread among psychologists. This paper aims to provide a didactic application of IRT and to highlight some of these advantages for psychological test development. IRT was applied to two scales (a positive and a negative affect ...

Along with the increasing popularity of item response theory (IRT) in testing practices, it is important to check a fundamental assumption of most of the popular IRT models, which is unidimensionality. Nevertheless, it is hard for educational and psychological tests to be strictly unidimensional. The tests studied in this paper are from a standardized high-stake testing program. They feature po...