Psychometrics, Test Theory, and the Latent Factors Model (eBook)

Petr Blahus, Bruce L. Brown, C. Victor Bunderson, Joseph A. Olsen (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
608 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
9781119312222 (ISBN)

Infos

A combination of psychometric theory, history, philosophy, and practice, with recent advances in analytical methods, metrology, and design.

Psychometrics, Test Theory, and the Latent Factors Model began as a strong manuscript by Petr Blahu?, based upon his lifelong passion of applying the latent factors model to kinesiology and biomechanics. Before his death he entrusted it to three co-authors who completed the book with in-chapter explanations, accessible mathematical appendices, and computational guides. It was also expanded to include important advances since 2010 in psychometric methods, contemporary developments in metrology, and the science of domain-specific design. Comprehensive in scope, the text contains computational guides for the use of Stata, M-plus, and SPSS in Factor Analysis, Classical Test Theory, and Item-Response Theory. The authors highlight the practicality of software integration in order to successfully produce psychometrically sound research. Written by an international and decades-spanning team of experienced psychometricians, the text anticipates a future psychometric science that could earn its place in the international metrology community.

The book is filled with suggestions, tips, and practical guidance about best practices and efficient strategies for modeling and model selection. In addition, the book includes important cautions and warnings about misuse and misinterpretations of common, but limited, analytical techniques. The book is historically informed, philosophically grounded, mathematically justified, and methodologically current. This important text:

• Applies intuitive reasoning and common examples to aid in the understanding of advanced technical concepts.
• Includes the conceptual, statistical, and philosophical background of psychometrics.
• Features recent advances and opposing views in psychometric theory.
• Contains concrete examples from current research, including cognitive tests and neurological data.
• Opens the vista for a future of testing with greatly increased use of well-constructed, learner-centered performance scales using computer-adaptive testing with feedback over multiple attempts.

Psychometrics, Test Theory, and the Latent Factors Model is intended for forward-looking students and teachers in the behavioral, educational, health, and social sciences.

Petr Blahu?, PhD, was DrSc, Professor, Division of Methodology, in the Faculty of Physical Education and Sport, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. A distinguished international scholar, he published in Czech, English, and Russian.

Bruce L. Brown, PhD, is Professor of Psychology at Brigham Young University and authored Multivariate Analysis for the Biobehavioral and Social Sciences (Brown, Hendrix, Hedges, and Smith, 2012, Wiley).

C. Victor Bunderson, PhD, is emeritus professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University. He served on the Assessment Council of Western Governors University from 1997 through 2023. His experience includes VP Research Management at Educational Testing Service, and cofounder of several technology companies that advanced and applied concepts and methods explained in this book.

Joseph A. Olsen, PhD, is Associate Research Professor, Assistant Dean, and Director of Research Support in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences at Brigham Young University. Dr. Olsen advises on methods and software in graduate research projects across many departments.

Textauszug

Preface

This book honors Petr Blahuš, deceased scholar and scientist of note, but it is not a Festschrift written by former students and colleagues. Instead, it honors his work and his memory by placing connected parts of his collection of valuable manuscripts within a broader framework of relevant work since his death. It reshapes some of his prescient but unfinished ideas to become possibly very useful contributions to contemporary psychometrics. Through this broader framework we, as continuing co‐authors, are striving to make factor analytic methods, IRT, and related tools more accessible. These have great utility, not only in the development of good measuring instruments, but also in connecting them better to theory—an attainment most earnestly pursued by Petr in his manuscript. To be useful as a textbook, it must also have the easy‐to‐understand explanations and conceptual, mathematical, and computer tools that enable students to become proficient in the use of psychometric and statistical tools. These have been added both within the chapters and as mathematical appendices and computational demonstrations and guides.

The three co‐authors became Petr’s students in the sense of our thorough study of the manuscript he entrusted to BYU Professor Bruce Brown in 2010. We have been taught by his fresh and unique insights into the science of psychometrics. For several years we have been focused both upon understanding the depth of his approach and insights, and how they fit with the many psychometric advances of the past two decades. This book has taken a long time to reconstruct, reconsider, and write, and is published in 2025 as a textbook for Educational, Psychological, and Kinanthropometrical measurement, perhaps also useful for other measurement‐oriented disciplines in the human sciences.

In 2014, Victor Bunderson had agreed to write a Foreword, which by definition is written by someone other than an author. That task required reading the evolving chapters and appendices of the final manuscript which immersed him into reading the drafts that were available. In 2018 his time became freer and he began to write the explanatory text and updating text surrounding Petr’s sections in several of the chapters. Later he began to write what became Chapter 8, the Metrology Chapter. We as co‐authors have written this Preface that includes an Introduction to how the book is conceptualized and structured. It shares our gratitude for those individuals and works most influential to this synthesis of Petr Blahuš’s manuscript with later work, including the additional references we cite, and our view of where the topics of Psychometrics, Test Theory, and The Latent Factors Model are going.

How this book came to be. Petr Blahuš was a world‐travelling scholar. He was a visiting professor in Paris, Athens, Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia, and the United States. His many publications were in English, Russian, French, and Czech. His longest visit was in 2001–2002 for a full year at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, United States. It was there that he met and worked with the colleagues who would later become his successor authors of a book he envisioned as a capstone to his work. He drafted some sections while he was at BYU, and was granted permission by Professor Erin Bigler, with whom he worked closely, to use as data examples some of Erin’s studies using the CERAD Battery. You will see these in the text. Early manuscript material was in use with his students in Prague several years before 2008.

Unfortunately, Professor Blahuš became ill and passed away in 2010 at the age of 66. Shortly before his death Bruce Brown and his wife Susan visited him in Prague. Dr. Brown was and is a Professor of Psychology and Quantitative Methods. He and Petr had become close friends when they worked together at BYU in 2001. During the Browns’ 2010 visit to Prague, Petr gave Bruce the manuscript, and Bruce promised to make every effort to see it completed and published. This book came to be only because Bruce and his colleagues believed it was a strong manuscript and well worth the time and dedication it would take to complete it. It was also necessary to bring topics up to date to integrate the influence of important new developments in the field, and to add student‐friendly materials and study aids for a textbook format.

The original manuscript had a proposed title of Structural Modeling, and a provisional subtitle for use with students: A Methodology‐Based Introduction to Behavioral Statistics, Test Theory, and the Latent Factors Model. The title for the completed and published book is Psychometrics, Test Theory, and the Latent Factors Model.

Psychometrics: We follow his methodological approach and explain psychometric methods through the many analyses that a psychometrician performs, but especially in establishing scales and their validation.

Test Theory: He wrote of both classical test theory and also modern test theory, that is, Item Response Theory—recognizing it has flowered and evolved during the past 15 years—perhaps more than Petr expected.

Latent Factors Model: This part of the title implies the need for a particular type of powerful measurement scales and the logical and mathematical processes necessary for their Validation. Valid Measurement Scales becomes, therefore, one of the four overarching topics of this book without appearing in the title.

More completely, the four main topics are: psychometrics, valid measurement scales, test theory, and the Latent Factors Model. At the time he was trying the manuscript out with students, he was serving under the title of Petr Blahuš, PhD, DrSc, Professor, Division of Methodology, Department of Kinanthropology; and also Humanities, Faculty of Physical Education and Sport, Charles University, Prague.

Kinanthropometrics. When we speak of Psychometrics, we also embrace Petr’s particular focus, Kinanthropometrics. Petr was methodologically oriented. His methodologies came from these disciplines and from mathematical statistics. Petr’s department of Kinanthropology was proposed and created as a separate department at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, in 1989. It offered a distinctly scientific approach to higher studies in physical education, sports science, therapy, and sports medicine, and replaced earlier doctoral degrees in those fields. A specialty within that field is Kinanthropometry. It provides specialized metrology and methods for sports science and physical education. He gives examples from these areas in his manuscript. However, the manuscript is not a treatise on the specialty of Kinanthropometry. It falls squarely under the more general term of Psychometrics, with the subtlety of mental measurement strengthened by the contrast to objective physical performance.

It seems apparent from his body of work that the study of human movement is more readily grounded in reality than is explaining invisible processes of thinking and feeling. The sequence of physical movements in a complex performance are often observable. This may be partly the reason he repeatedly demands clear and explicitly investigated and understood constructs—in non‐movement domains involving invisible cognitive, conative, or affective states as well as in the more spread‐out in time and visible sequences of physical movements. This is a unique perspective. Sport increases one’s focus on realism because the skilled movements of the human body in sports science are also accompanied by repeated replication and thus to improvement over practice trials. Since comparability is vital in documenting new records and placement in events, sports venues have become well standardized. Norms at various ages and levels of practice gradually become documented and spread downward linking through international competition the athletic educational systems of each nation.

Petr Blahuš believed in good science in the behavioral domains where he worked. He believed that such science required mathematical models that were as accurate as possible in depicting an underlying reality. He resisted operationist pretenses that the operations could stand for the underlying reality. He was a strong methodologist but sought methodologies that he had traced to their historical origins; ones whose practical advantages and weaknesses were understood. He looked for insights from appropriate philosophies of science.

His early academic career focused on methodologies, factor analysis in particular, and their foundations in science and mathematics. He took additional studies in the philosophy of science and added to those studies throughout his life. After his dissertation in 1974, he rose within eight years to become Acting Head of the Division of Mathematical Methods and Experimental Techniques within the Division of Psychology, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. After another eight years there (simultaneously serving as Associate Professor at Charles University, Prague), he became Vice Dean for Research at Charles and later served as Vice Rector of Charles University for three years while remaining active in publishing during those years of full administrative responsibilities.

Attaining the rank of Full Professor in 1992, his inauguration lecture and defense was on the measurement and modeling of motor abilities in developing their scientific theory. It was an extension of his dissertation work. As we will see, measurement and modeling of abilities is inseparable from understanding a...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 10.12.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Mathematik / Informatik ► Mathematik ► Statistik
• ISBN-13: 9781119312222 / 9781119312222