Date of Award

1-1-2010

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Organizational Unit

Morgridge College of Education

First Advisor

Kathy E. Green, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Donald Bacon

Third Advisor

Duan Zhang

Keywords

Attitude measure, Computerized adaptive testing, Item order effect

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the effects of altered item order on attitude measures for both computerized adaptive and conventional survey formats. Based on items modified from a dissertation/thesis completion survey (Green & Kluever, 1997) with three scales, three survey versions were generated with items ordered by difficulty as hard-to-easy (H-E), easy-to-hard (E-H), and five medium trait level items presented first followed by randomly ordered items (M-R) for conventional survey format. Significant differences in item difficulty and item discrimination were found for two of the three scales. Differences in scale reliability were detected for the procrastination and responsibility scales. Also, significant correlations between scale total score and scale attitude strength were discovered with each survey version.

Further, two computerized adaptive survey version were generated. One began with items at medium and the other at extremely high trait levels. Results showed significant differences in number of items administered to achieve a set level of precision for two scales and significant differences in reaction time were found for one scale between the two versions. The version of item starting at the extreme trait level required more items, and took longer to respond to. Further, significant differences in the estimated person parameter were found for one scale between the two survey versions. Based on the results of both survey formats indicating item order effects pose a problem for assessing attitude.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Pei-Hua Chen

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

126 p.

Discipline

Educational tests & measurements

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