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In the unlikely event that Statistical Horizons LLC must cancel a seminar, we will do our best to inform you as soon as possible of the cancellation. You would then have the option of receiving a full refund of the seminar fee or a credit towards another seminar. In no event shall Statistical Horizons LLC be liable for any incidental or consequential damages that you may incur because of the cancellation.

A 3-Day Livestream Seminar Taught by Tenko Raykov, Ph.D.

Behavioral, social, educational, biomedical, business, and marketing scientists are frequently involved in the evaluation, development and revision of multiple-component measuring instruments, such as tests, scales, inventories, questionnaires, surveys, self-reports, testlets, subscales, etc. Scores obtained from them are often employed in various analyses addressing substantive research questions.

The quality of these instruments and resulting individual parameter estimates determine the extent to which the subsequent analyses and modeling efforts can be trusted. To ensure high quality of the measuring instruments, researchers must carefully study their psychometric properties and engage in possibly multiple revisions of them.

This seminar provides a thorough introduction to Item Response Theory (IRT, Item Response Modeling, IRM). It covers many topics at the introductory to intermediate levels, as well as several more advanced topics. Throughout the course, numerous empirical examples are utilized from the educational, behavioral, and social sciences.

The seminar draws substantially from (and goes well beyond) Professor Raykov’s recently published book with Professor G. A. Marcoulides: A Course in Item Response Theory and Modeling with Stata. The popular packages Stata and Mplus are used in the examples, along with a detailed discussion of the needed command syntax and interpretation of the resulting output.

References to the increasingly popular software flexMIRT are made on several occasions as well as to IRTPRO and the package ‘ltm’ of R, and use of them is made in some of the examples. At the end of the seminar, the participants will also be able to conduct software-based analyses using the modeling methods covered in the course.

Participants in this seminar can expect to come away with:

1. A nuanced understanding of the conceptual foundations and basic mathematical and statistical relationships underlying IRT/IRM.
2. The ability to understand, interpret and explain the output from Stata and Mplus when used for IRT/IRM, and to evaluate pertinent psychometric properties of given measuring instruments, such as tests, scales, testlets, subscales, inventories, self-reports, surveys or questionnaires.
3. An appreciation of the advantages of a thorough study of the underlying latent structure of (tentative versions of) multi-component instruments.
4. Practical tools and strategies for constructing an initial version of a test/instrument of interest and its revision aimed at improving its quality, based on item information and test information functions.
5. The ability to improve a given measuring instrument, in order to achieve corresponding higher psychometric standards.
6. The ability to deal with issues arising in the practice of studying tests, scales, and behavioral or mental measuring instruments using IRT/IRM.