Measuring Student Involvement: A Comparison of Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory in the Construction of Scales from Student Surveys

By Jessica Sharkness, Linda T. DeAngelo. 2011

97 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 involvement and one measuring academic involvement. Findings indicate that although both CTT and IRT can be used to obtain the same information about the extent to which scale items tap into the latent trait being measured, the two measurement theories provide very different pictures of scale precision. On the whole, IRT provides much richer information about measurement precision as well as a clearer roadmap for scale improvement. The findings support the use of IRT for scale construction and survey development in higher education.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1454ff59cc4a05f2a4f9ac83f3f0e5dc5b36c0cf

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In Education

1. Young K. Kim
2. Linda J. Sax
3. Carol A. Lundberg
4. Jillian Ives
5. Milagros Castillo-Montoya

Citations in the corpus

• The Effects of Student–Faculty Interaction on Academic Self-Concept: Does Academic Major Matter? (2014, methodology): “This scale is a CIRP construct created by HERI using item response theory (IRT) (see Appendix Table 6, Sharkness and DeAngelo (2011), and Sharkness et al. (2010) for additional details on this construct).”