Author ORCID Identifier

Smith - https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1286-0852

Wooten - https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7838-9349

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-28-2023

Publication Title

Southern Economic Journal

Abstract

The fields of psychometrics, economic education, and education have developed statistically-valid methods of assessing knowledge and learning. These methods include item response theory, value-added learning models, and disaggregated learning. These methods, however, focus on multiple-choice or single response assessments. Faculty and administrators routinely assess knowledge through papers, thesis presentations, or other demonstrations of knowledge assessed with rubric rows. This paper presents a statistical approach to estimating a proxy for student ability and rubric row difficulty. Moreover, we have developed software so that practitioners can more easily apply this method to their instruments. This approach can be used in researching education treatment effects, practitioners measuring learning outcomes in their own classrooms, or estimating knowledge for administrative assessment. As an example, we have applied these new methods to projects in a large Labor Economics course at a public university.

Comments

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2023 The Authors. Southern Economic Journal published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The Southern Economic Association.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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