SEALS Screening Early and Adaptively for Language Skills

• Braeken, Johan & Laar, Saskia Van (2026). Assessing the Measurement Equivalence of a set of Items: Item-specific Diagnostics on an Interpretable Metric. Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation (PARE). 31(1). doi: 10.7275/PARE.3048. Full text in Research Archive
• Chen, Jianan; Brinchmann, Ellen Irén & Braeken, Johan (2025). Setting Discontinue Rules for Progressive Tests: A Practical and Transparent Toolkit. Assessment (ASM). ISSN 1073-1911. doi: 10.1177/10731911251385776. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Progressive tests are a popular tailored test format where items are administered in increasing order of difficulty level and discontinued according to a rule system that should counter excessive response burden for test participants and guarantee efficient use of resources for test administrators. To facilitate evidence-based decision-making for setting appropriate discontinue rules, we propose a transparent approach that charts the impact of varied alternative discontinue rules on accuracy and efficiency. These A–E charts are based on retroactively applying discontinue rules to normative item response data. We show that a universal discontinue rule likely does not exist and that the optimal rule varies as a function of the desired efficiency-accuracy trade-off suitable for the intended test use and target population. The proposed approach provides a pragmatic solution for practitioners, researchers, test developers, and test publishers to rethink the existing discontinue rules, systematically evaluate the alternatives, and set appropriate rules.

• Koopman, Letty & Braeken, Johan (2024). Investigating the Ordering Structure of Clustered Items Using Nonparametric Item Response Theory. Educational and Psychological Measurement. ISSN 0013-1644. doi: 10.1177/00131644241274122. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Educational and psychological tests with an ordered item structure enable efficient test administration procedures and allow for intuitive score interpretation and monitoring. The effectiveness of the measurement instrument relies to a large extent on the validated strength of its ordering structure. We define three increasingly strict types of ordering for the ordering structure of a measurement instrument with clustered items: a weak and a strong invariant cluster ordering and a clustered invariant item ordering. Following a nonparametric item response theory (IRT) approach, we proposed a procedure to evaluate the ordering structure of a clustered item set along this three-fold continuum of order invariance. The basis of the procedure is (a) the local assessment of pairwise conditional expectations at both cluster and item level and (b) the global assessment of the number of Guttman errors through new generalizations of the H-coefficient for this item-cluster context. The procedure, readily implemented in R, is illustrated and applied to an empirical example. Suggestions for test practice, further methodological developments, and future research are discussed.

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• Chen, Jianan & Braeken, Johan (2026). Traditional Progressive Tests with Stopping Rules from Computerized Adaptive Testing: Do Potential Advantages Outweigh Added Complexity? Full text in Research Archive
• Chen, Jianan; Brinchmann, Ellen Irén & Braeken, Johan (2025). Setting Stopping Rules for Progressive Tests: A Practical and Transparent Toolkit. Full text in Research Archive

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