Handbook of Modern Item Response Theory

by Wim J. van der Linden

Book Overview

Item response theory has become an essential component in the toolkit of every researcher in the behavioral sciences. It provides a powerful means to study individual responses to a variety of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0387946616
• ISBN13: 9780387946610
• Release Date: November 1996
• Publisher: Springer
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A comprehensive look at IRT circa mid 90s

This edited volume provides synoptic chapters on the field of item response models. Nearly every variant of model--there were a lot then, more now--gets a chapter, usually written by one of the most prominent names associated with the model. For instance, R. Darrell Bock wrote the chapter on nominal models. The writing is generally clear and notation is consistent, as another reviewer noted. However... the field has changed a lot in the intervening time since publication. This book represents an overview of "state of the art" circa the mid 1990s. If you need an introduction to a lot of models, it's good since those haven't changed, even though many have been added. However, you still see things like joint maximum likelihood estimation (JMLE) seriously discussed and there is, if I recall correctly, no mention of MCMC methods or of the more "modern" view of IRT as a generalized linear mixed model, discussed in books like the volume edited by Paul de Boeck and Mark Wilson (2004), Explanatory Item Response Models. At publication, this would have been *****, but it loses one due to age.

A Comprehenstive Account of Item Response Theory

The book, edited by van der Linden and Hambleton, is a comprehensive account of Item Response Theory. The "modern" in the title of the book is indeed reflected in new developments such as nonparametric models and mixture models. The audience of the book is targeted toward those who want to further develop models around Item Response Theory. People who are more interested in applying IRT may prefer books like Applying the Rasch Model: Fundamental Measurement in the Human Sciences. Although the book was contributed by multiple authors, the two editors indeed made efforts making notation consistent and the structure of every chapter similar (Introduction, Model Description, Parameter Estimation, Examples, References), which is very important for readers like me who don't follow the book from cover to cover.