{"title":"Estimating Reliability for Tests With One Constructed-Response Item in a Section","authors":"Yanxuan Qu, Sandip Sinharay","doi":"10.1002/ets2.12382","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>The goal of this paper is to find better ways to estimate the internal consistency reliability of scores on tests with a specific type of design that are often encountered in practice: tests with constructed-response items clustered into sections that are not parallel or tau-equivalent, and one of the sections has only one item. To estimate the reliability of scores on this kind of test, we propose a two-step approach (denoted as CA_STR) that first estimates the reliability of scores on the section with a single item using the correction for attenuation method and then estimates the reliability of scores on the whole test using the stratified coefficient alpha. We compared the CA_STR method with three other reliability estimation approaches under various conditions using both real and simulated data. We found that overall, the CA_STR method performed the best and it was easy to implement.</p>","PeriodicalId":11972,"journal":{"name":"ETS Research Report Series","volume":"2024 1","pages":"1-16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2024-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ets2.12382","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ETS Research Report Series","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ets2.12382","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"Social Sciences","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The goal of this paper is to find better ways to estimate the internal consistency reliability of scores on tests with a specific type of design that are often encountered in practice: tests with constructed-response items clustered into sections that are not parallel or tau-equivalent, and one of the sections has only one item. To estimate the reliability of scores on this kind of test, we propose a two-step approach (denoted as CA_STR) that first estimates the reliability of scores on the section with a single item using the correction for attenuation method and then estimates the reliability of scores on the whole test using the stratified coefficient alpha. We compared the CA_STR method with three other reliability estimation approaches under various conditions using both real and simulated data. We found that overall, the CA_STR method performed the best and it was easy to implement.