Abstract
One of the mathematics courses in adult basic education in the Netherlands is offered at three different levels. The majority of the students are foreign and, due to a large variation in background, most of their educational histories are unknown or can be determined only unreliably. In the program’s intake procedure, a placement test is used to assign students to a course level. As the students’ abilities vary widely, the paper-and-pencil placement test currently used has the two-stage format described in Lord (1971). In the first stage, all examinees take a routing test of 15 items with an average difficulty matching the average proficiency in the population of students. Depending on their scores on the routing test, the examinees then take one of the three follow-up tests. Each follow-up test consists of 10 items.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Lord, F. M. (1971). A theoretical study of two-stage testing. Psychometrika, 36, 227–242.
Straetmans, G. J. J. M. & Eggen, T. J. H. M. (1998). Computerized adaptive testing: What it is and how it works. Educational Technology, 38, 45–52.
Verhelst, N. D. & Glas, C. A. W. (1995). The generalized one parameter model: OPLM. In G. H. Fischer & I. W. Molenaar (Eds.), Rasch models: Their foundations, recent developments and applications (pp. 215–237). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Wainer, H. (1992). Some practical considerations when converting a linearly administered test to an adaptive format (Research Report No. 92-13). Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.
Weiss, D. J. (1974). Strategies of adaptive ability measurement (Research Report No. 74-5). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Department of Psychology, Psychometric Methods Program.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Verschoor, A.J., Straetmans, G.J.J.M. (2009). MATHCAT: A Flexible Testing System in Mathematics Education for Adults. In: van der Linden, W., Glas, C. (eds) Elements of Adaptive Testing. Statistics for Social and Behavioral Sciences. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-85461-8_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-85461-8_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-85459-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-85461-8
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)