To equip governments, systems and organisations with the Item Response Theory (IRT) and its application in educational measurement, the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) provided modular accredited short courses to 13 Pacific countries as part of the Foundations in Applied Measurement in Education (FAME) programme at a regional convening, in July.
The Pacific Community (SPC), through the Pacific Regional Education Framework (PacREF), was able to secure ACER’s support to build the technical capacity of its member countries and to further strengthen its professional staff in the area of measurement theory and its application.
IRT is an assessment model that describes how examinees respond to items in a test, showing the relationship between the examines stress, knowledge and attitudes and items of measure in an unobservable continuum.
Tuivaelagi Milovale, Senior Assessment Officer at Samoa’s Ministry of Education and Culture, explained that “Through this workshop, I have learnt more features of the IRT software that are useful for informing improvements to assessment items and students’ performances as well. It is important to have this knowledge as this enables me to report on the decision to be made to enhance the quality of assessment items and student’s parameters”.
The FAME programme contains eight courses that are designed to build the region’s expertise to enable high-level analysis and reporting of large-scale educational data trends. This involves using ConQuest software to conduct psychometric analysis on assessment items.
David Jeffries, Research Fellow at ACER and the workshop facilitator, highlighted that “We hope the training that we have provided was able to allow the participants to gain foundational working knowledge and understanding of IRT concepts and how to apply them using the ACER ConQuest software – going beyond of having an understanding of how it works in the PILNA context by applying it to their own national assessments”.
The July workshop was the second convening of the cohort and was expanded to include a total of 13 Pacific Island countries: Cook Islands, Fiji, Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Republic of Marshall Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
The regional workshop not only introduced the foundational concepts of educational assessment and provided an overview of technical aspects of constructing measures but also allowed country representatives to conduct and interpret a psychometric analysis using the ConQuest software and explore validity and comparability through an IRT paradigm.
The SPC team will monitor the implementation of the knowledge and skills gained by country representatives and work with its ACER counterparts to develop future programmes that would benefit the region. In the meantime, SPC, through its Educational Quality and Assessment Programme (EQAP) will support further capacity building at national level of the participating countries.
