2018 Ideas in Testing Seminar
On Nov. 2 (Friday) Illinois Tech hosted the seventh annual Ideas in Testing Research Seminar. This year’s conference brought together 50 members of the Midwest testing community, including students, practitioners, and academics in industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology, educational measurement and professional licensure, and certification testing to discuss new research and the latest advances in testing.
The panel of presenters came from several universities including Illinois Tech, University of Iowa, University of Notre Dame, and Bowling Green State University, as well as test publishers from Pearson VUE and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Presentations covered topics in computer adaptive testing, automatic item generation, longitudinal measurement equivalence, natural language processing in job analysis, gamified assessments, and much more.
Illinois Tech was well represented at the conference, contributing a diverse set of presentations:
- Comparison of Item Selection Criteria in Multidimensional Computer Adaptive Testing with the Graded Response Items — Scott Morris (Illinois Tech), Michael Bass (Northwestern), Matthew Lauritsen (Illinois Tech), Sheng Zhang (Illinois Tech), and Richard Neapolitan (Northwestern).
- Applicant reactions to AIG: A CAT AIG feasibility study — Alan Mead (Talent Algorithms Inc.), Sheng Zhang (Illinois Tech), and Daniel Stopka (Illinois Tech).
- Evaluating Alpha/Beta/Gamma Change with Ordinal Confirmatory Factor Analysis — Sean Wright, Scott Morris, and Daniel Gandara (Illinois Tech).
- A Review of Games Based Assessment — Reya Green and Kristina Bauer (Illinois Tech).
- Semi-Supervised Learning for Criterion-Related Validity Studies — Alan Mead (Talent Algorithms Inc.) and Daniel Stopka (Illinois Tech).
The conference was co-sponsored by Pearson VUE and Illinois Tech, and organized by conference founders Alan Mead, Ph.D., president of Talent Algorithms, Inc. and former Illinois Tech faculty, and Kirk Becker, Ph.D., of Pearson VUE, as well as Illinois Tech's Scott Morris, Ph.D., who is has helped organize the conference for the last two years.
A call for papers for the 2019 conference will be published next summer. The conference welcomes presentations on work in progress, so this could be a great place to try out new ideas and get feedback from the testing community. For more information or to be added to the Ideas in Testing mailing list, please contact Alan Mead , Scott Morris, or Kirk Becker.
--Scott B. Morris
Professor of Psychology
Lewis College of Human Sciences
Illinois Institute of Technology
