Multidimensional IRT Scale Linking Under a Mixture of Bifactor Models for Mixed-Format Tests

Like unidimensional item response theory (IRT) models, bifactor models in multidimensional IRT have a scale indeterminacy problem, and due to this problem scale linking methods are needed to place all bifactor model parameter estimates from separate calibrations on a common ability scale. Four bifactor scale linking methods including the direct least squares (DLS), mean/least squares (MLS), item category response function (ICRF), and test response function (TRF) methods have been presented for use with single-format tests. Parallel to the 2006 paper of Kim and Lee, this paper extends the four scale linking methods to a mixture of bifactor models for mixed-format tests. Each linking method extended is intended to handle mixed-format tests using any mixture of the following bifactor extensions of four unidimensional IRT models: the bifactor three-parameter logistic, bifactor graded response, bifactor generalized partial credit, and bifactor nominal response models. For generality, symmetric criterion functions are proposed for the ICRF and TRF methods. Given two sets of parameter estimates for the common items linking two test forms, each linking method estimates the dilation (slope) and translation (intercept) coefficients of a linear transformation. Simulations are conducted to investigate the performance of the four linking methods. The results indicate that overall, the ICRF method performs very well, the MLS and DLS methods perform well (the MLS method is slightly better than the DLS method), and the TRF method performs poorly in estimating the linking coefficients. The inferiority of the TRF method is mainly due to its poor estimation of the translation coefficients.