Contemporary Issues in Scaling, Linking & Equating

The Contemporary Issues in Scaling, Linking, & Equating (SLE) SIGIMIE is dedicated to:

Exploring emerging measurement challenges in establishing and maintaining score scales
Upholding fundamental principles by ensuring that our rapidly evolving fields remain grounded in rigorous, principled approaches that are explainable, interpretable, and defensible
Fostering the integration of theory and practice; and bringing together professionals from diverse backgrounds to exchange knowledge and to develop solutions

SIGIMIE Leadership

Co-Chair: Jinghua Liu
Co-Chair: Tim Moses

Advisory Board

Michael J. Kolen, University of Iowa
Neil Dorans, ETS (retired)
Won-Chan Lee, University of Iowa
Alina von Davier, DuoLingo

Webinars

Online webinars will be hosted bi-annually and offset from the timing of NCME annual conference. Webinars are intended to increase member engagement and enhance members’ skill sets and would last 1 hour in duration and be hosted via Zoom. For some webinars, we’d like to invite either a well-known SLE scholar or an individual who has recently published on a topic related to SLE. They could present their recent research or another SLE-related topic of their choice for the first 30 to 40 minutes and attendees would have the chance to ask questions in the remaining 20-30 minutes. Other webinars could include small-scale trainings and demonstrations of open-source or freely available software and could be broken down into several sessions, if interest is indicated. Alternatively, graduate students could be invited to present their SLE research and/or ideas, and gather feedback from established professionals in the field.

History of Test Equating Methods and Practices Through 1985 is the first online webinar that featured Michael Kolen on August 27th, 2020.

Storytelling the History of Scaling, Linking, & Equating and Looking to the Future is an online webinar series that featured SLE legacy scholars as well as scholars with on-going SLE-related research agendas, in April to July, 2021. Each presenter led a 1-hour webinar discussion on topics such as how they ended up researching SLE methods, their biggest accomplishments, unfinished business, filed projection over the next 10 years, and perceived impact by the COVID pandemic. Recordings of each webinar can be found below.

SLE Training Sessions is a series of free online training sessions on topics directly related to scaling, linking, and equating (SLE) in October, November, and December, 2021. These sessions were geared towards graduate students or those who have not had the opportunity to receive formal trainings in SLE methods. Each session was offered by an SLE scholar and ran 1 ½ to 2 hours.

Scaling: Approaches and Interpretations featured Tim Moses on Jan.18th, 2024. The webinar reviewed and discussed scaling approaches established to support a range of interpretations in the practical context, and also with respect to historical and current perspectives in the field.

Linking Responsive Assessments: Tradeoffs and Implications for Inferences featured Tim Moses and Neil Dorans on Nov. 18th, 2024. This talk examines three types of socioculturally-responsive assessments in terms of how they address trad-offs in validity for specific populations versus comparability within and across populations.

The biggest test equating study in the world … Ever featured Tom Benton and Matthew Carroll on Mar. 26th, 2025 to introduced and discussed a large empirical study to understand which equating methods work best under which circumstances.

SIGIMIE-Specific NCME Sessions

The SLE SIGIMIE Session for the 2024 NCME conference (April 2024) brought professionals from both academia and industry together to discuss the applications and issues of SLE in AIG.

Theme: Scaling, Linking, and Equating in Automatic Item Generation

Panelists:

Richard Luecht, University of North Carolina Greensboro
Ikkyu Choi and Sandip Sinharay, ETS
Weiwei Cui and Thomas Proctor, College Board

The SLE SIGIMIE Session for the 2023 NCME conference (April 15, 2023) brought professionals together who work closely with technology-enhanced assessments in various testing fields to share their expertise in scaling, linking, and equating practices.

Theme: Scaling, Linking, Equating in Technology-Enhanced Assessments

Panelists:

Xia Mao, National Board of Osteopathic Medical Examiners (NBOME); Larissa Smith, ETS
Shu-Chuan Kao, National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN); Joe Betts, National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN); Chih-Kai (Cary) Lin, National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN)
Ye (Cheryl) Ma, Amazon Web Services (AWS); Jennifer Davis, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Discussant:

Alina von Davier, Duolingo

The SLE SIGIMIE Session for the 2022 NCME conference (April 9, 2022) brought professionals together from various industries such as medicine, psychology, and business to discuss their unique challenges and approaches to SLE, connected approaches used in these unique settings to those used in traditional educational settings, and provided a framework within which scholars can expand their SLE research lens.

Theme: Scaling, Linking, Equating Beyond Our Comfort Zones

Panelists:

James Ingrisone, Pearson VUE
Huijuan Meng, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Stephen Stark, University of South Florida
Seung W. Choi, University of Texas at Austin

Discussants:

Tim Moses, College Board
Neil Dorans, ETS

The SLE SIGIMIE Session for the 2021 NCME conference (May 25, 2021) featured an expert panel discussion based on questions raised from our SIGIMIE members. Questions concerned general issues in SLE as well as special designs and considerations related to the impact of COVID-19.

Theme: Scaling, Linking, & Equating Du Jour: A Discussion with Experts

Panelists:

Michael Kolen, University of Iowa
Marie Wiberg, Department of Statistics, USBE
Tim Moses, College Board
Jorge Gonzalez, Pontificia Universidad Catolic

Discussant:

Robert Brennan, University of Iowa