Alderson (2005) suggests that diagnostic tests should identify strengths and weaknesses in learners' use of language, focus on specific elements rather than global abilities and provide detailed feedback to stakeholders. However, rating scales used in performance assessment have been repeatedly criticized for being imprecise, for using impressionistic terminology (Fulcher, 2003; Upshur & Turner...

BACKGROUND The Educational Needs Assessment Tool (the ENAT) is a 39-item patient questionnaire originally developed in the UK to assess educational needs of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The objective of this study was to assess the cross-cultural validity of the ENAT in 7 European countries. METHODS The ENAT was translated into Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Sw...

BACKGROUND Self-efficacy is needed for effectuating lifestyle changes, and it is therefore an important target related to health. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSE) using Rasch analysis in a sample of adults with morbid obesity. METHODS A convenience sample of adults with morbid obesity was recruited from patient educ...

Tacit knowledge was originally introduced into the professional literature by Michael Polanyi and later made popular by researchers in a variety of domains. Measuring this implicit form of procedural knowledge requires multiple approaches to adequately “capture” what is often known, but not easily articulated. The present study combines use of Sternberg et al.’s framework for capturing domain-s...

OBJECTIVE Advances in health measurement have led to the application of Rasch Item Response Theory (IRT) analysis (Rasch analysis) to evaluate instruments measuring health status and quality of life of patients, including the Health Assessment Questionnaire and SF-36. This study investigated the extent to which the Western Ontario MacMaster osteoarthritis questionnaire (WOMAC) satisfies the Ras...

The field of Psychometrics routinely grapples with the question of what it means to measure the inherent ability of an organism to perform a given task, and for the last forty years, the field has increasingly relied on probabilistic methods such as the Rasch model for test construction and the analysis of test results. Because the underlying issues of measuring ability apply to human language ...

OBJECTIVE In patients with Type 2 diabetes, to determine the factors associated with diabetes knowledge, derived from Rasch analysis, and compare results with a traditional raw scoring method. RESEARCH DESIGN & METHODS Participants in this cross-sectional study underwent a comprehensive clinical and biochemical assessment. Diabetes knowledge (main outcome) was assessed using the Diabetes Know...

PURPOSE To determine which version of the Visual Function Index-14 (VF-14) most precisely measured cataract surgery outcomes, rescale the VF-14 using Rasch analysis, and create a short-form version for comparison. SETTING Flinders Medical Centre, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. METHODS In this cohort study incorporating questionnaire development, participants were drawn from the catar...

AIM One of the most commonly used tools for measuring job satisfaction in nursing is the Stamps Index of Work Satisfaction. Several studies have reported on the reliability of the Stamps' tool based on traditional statistical model. The aim of this study was to apply the Rasch model to examine the adequacy of Stamps's Index of Work Satisfaction for measuring nurses' job satisfaction cross-cultu...