Introduction into Item Response Theory and Computer Adaptive Testing

Item banks and Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) have the potential to greatly improve the assessment of health outcomes. CATs promise to provide more precise and less burdensome instruments, and IRT item banks will help comparing established tools to move away from an instrument defined measurement towards greater standardization of Patient- Reported Outcome (PRO) measures. This presentation describes the features of item banks and CAT and discusses how to develop item banks. In CAT, a computer selects the items from an item bank that are most relevant for and informative about the particular respondent; thus…