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Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers

Publication date: 2003-01-01
Volume: 35 Pages: 537 - 549
Publisher: Springer

Author:

Smits, Dirk
De Boeck, Paul ; Verhelst, N

Keywords:

Social Sciences, Psychology, Mathematical, Psychology, Experimental, Psychology, INFERENCE, ABILITY, MODEL, Humans, Models, Psychological, Psychometrics, Software, 0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing, 1701 Psychology, 1702 Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology, 4905 Statistics, 5202 Biological psychology, 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology

Abstract:

The MIRID CML program is a program for the estimation of the parameter values of two different componential IRT models: the Rasch-MIRID and the OPLM-MIRID (Butter, 1994; Butter, De Boeck, & Verhelst, 1998). To estimate the parameters of both models, the program uses a CML approach. The model parameters can also be estimated with a MML approach that can be implemented in PROC NLMIXED of SAS Version 8. Both the MIRID CML program and the MML SAS approach are explained and compared in a simulation study. The results showed that they did about equally well in estimating the values of the item parameters but that there were some differences in the estimation of the person parameters, as could be expected from the differential assumptions regarding the distribution of the persons. The SAS MML approach is much slower than the MIRID CML program, but it is more flexible.