Content area
Full text
PSYCHOMETRIKAVOL. 76, NO. 3, 504506
JULY 2011
DOI: 10.1007/S11336-011-9212-X
BOOK REVIEW
M.D. RECKASE (2009) Multidimensional Item Response Theory (Statistics for Social and Behavioral Sciences). New York: Springer. 354 pages. US$79.95. ISBN: 978-0387899756
The publication of Multidimensional Item Response Theory (2009), as part of Springers Statistics for Social and Behavioral Sciences Series, adds a valuable piece to the existing resource of Item Response Theory (IRT). This book gives a comprehensive review of theories and applications in various aspects of Multidimensional Item Response Theory (MIRT). The term Multidimensional is due to the focus on multidimensional traits, contrasting to most IRT books in which the latent trait is assumed to be scalar. Actually, MIRT can be viewed as an extension of IRT for better interpreting the interaction between item characteristics and examinees behaviors. Practitioners have been trying for decades to quantify some testing behaviors by MIRT that unidimensional IRT failed to interpret. As an example of this, Roussos and Stout (1996) used MIRT to demonstrate why DIF can happen to some items. Today researchers in the eld have increasingly realized the advantage of MIRT for getting more information, such as a diagnostic prole, in addition to a single score. Many certication and admission boards are trying to combine regular tests with diagnostic services to allow candidates to obtain more informative diagnostic proles of their abilities. Undoubtedly, MIRT provides a theoretical background for such purposes (Mulder and van der Linden, 2009).
The author of the book, Professor Mark Reckase, is a distinguished scholar, practitioner, and teacher. He has made many signicant contributions to test theory, particularly MIRT. The objective of the book is to provide an overview of MIRT in an accessible manner to a wide audience without sacricing either expositional depth or clarity. To achieve this purpose, the book is divided into three parts. The rst part includes Chaps. 13, which provides a general conceptual overview of item response modeling, a brief summary of unidimensional IRT,...