Masters

Viiie: Ordered Categories, Disordered Thresholds

R Mead Measurement, Rasch Primer & Philosophy , , , ,

When the experts all agree, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the converse is true. When the experts don’t agree, the average person has no business thinking about it. B. Russell

The experts don’t agree on the topic of reversed thresholds and I’ve been thinking about it anyway. But I may be even less lucid than usual.

The categories, whether rating scale or partial credit, are always ordered: 0 always implies less than 1; 1 always implies less than 2; 2 always implies less than 3 . . . The concentric circle for k on the archery target is always inside (smaller thus harder to hit) than the circle for k-1. In baseball, you can’t get to second without touching first first. The transition points, or thresholds, might or might not be ordered in the data. Perhaps the circle for k-1 is so close in diameter to k that it is almost impossible to be inside k-1 without being inside k. Category k-1 might be very rarely observed, unless you have very sharp arrows and very consistent archers. Perhaps four-base hits actually require less of the aspect than three-base.

Continue . . . Ordered categories, disordered thresholds

Viiic: More than One; Less than Infinity

R Mead Basics, IRT, Measurement, Rasch Primer & Philosophy , , , ,

Rating Scale and Partial Credit models and the twain shall meet

For many testing situations, simple zero-one scoring is not enough and Poisson-type counts are too much. Polytomous Rasch models (PRM) cover the middle ground between one and infinity and allow scored responses from zero to a maximum of some small integer m. The integer scores must be ordered in the obvious way so that responding in category k implies more of the trait than responding in category k-1. While the scores must be consecutive integers, there is no requirement that the categories be equally spaced; that is something we can estimate just like ordinary item difficulties.

Once we admit the possibility of unequal spacing of categories, we almost immediately run into the issue, Can the thresholds (i.e., boundaries between categories) be disordered? To harken back to the baseball discussion, a four-base hit counts for more than a three-base hit, but four-bases are three or four times more frequent than three-bases. This begs an important question about whether we are observing the same aspect with three- and four-base hits, or with underused categories in general; we’ll come back to it.

To continue the archery metaphor, we now have a number, call it m, of concentric circles rather than just a single bull’s-eye with more points given for hitting within smaller circles. The case of m=1 is the dichotomous model and m→infinity is the Poisson, both of which can be derived as limiting cases of almost any of the models that follow. The Poisson might apply in archery if scoring were based on the distance from the center rather than which one of a few circles was hit; distance from the center (in, say, millimeters) is the same as an infinite number of rings, if you can read your ruler that precisely.

Read on . . .Polytomous Rasch Models

VIII. Beyond “THE RASCH MODEL”

R Mead IRT, Measurement, Rasch Primer & Philosophy , , , ,

All models are wrong. Some are useful. G.E.P.Box

Models must be used but must never be believed. Martin Bradbury Wilk

The Basic Ideas and polytomous items

We have thus far occupied ourselves entirely with the basic, familiar form of the Rasch model. I justify this fixation in two ways. First, it is the simplest and the form that is most used and second, it contains the kernel (bn – di) for pretty much everything else. It is the mathematical equivalent of a person throwing a dart at a balloon. Scoring is very simple; either you hit it or you don’t and they know if you did or not. The likelihood of the person hitting the target depends only on the skill of the person and the “elusiveness” of the target. If there is one The Rasch Model, this is it.

Continue reading . . . More Models