This workshop will provide an overview of the principles and some of the uses of Item Response Theory (IRT) and population modeling in educational large-scale assessments. The goal of the workshop is to familiarize participants with the topics related to assessment designs and IRT, and introduce them to commercially available software to conduct IRT analysis. The workshop is targeted to participants with some or little knowledge in the area of IRT. Participants of the workshop are expected to have basic knowledge of statistical analysis techniques.

The topics covered will be the following: Basics of survey instrument design, common IRT models, estimation of item and person parameters, linking scales, and choosing a reporting metric. Due to time constrains, there will be no hands-on exercises, but we will go over output produced by some of the commercially available software.

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