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Rejoinder to Commentaries on Lyu, Bolt and Westby’s “Exploring the Effects of Item Specific Factors in Sequential and IRTree Models”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Weicong Lyu*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Daniel M. Bolt
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
*
Correspondence should be made to Weicong Lyu, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 880 Educational Sciences, 1025 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA. Email: wlyu4@wisc.edu

Abstract

We respond to the commentaries on Lyu, Bolt and Westby’s “Exploring the effects of item specific factors in sequential and IRTree models.” The commentaries raise important points that allow us to clarify our theoretical expectation for item specific factors in many educational and psychological test items. At the same time, we agree with the commentaries in acknowledging challenges associated with providing empirical evidence for their presence and reflect on strategies that might support their estimation. We maintain that the principal concern is the ambiguity item specific factors create in attempting to interpret or use the parameters beyond the first node.

Type
Theory & Methods
Copyright
Copyright © 2023 The Author(s) under exclusive licence to The Psychometric Society

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