A Strategy for Controlling Item Exposure in Multidimensional Computerized Adaptive Testing

Abstract

Although computerized adaptive tests have enjoyed tremendous growth, solutions for important problems remain unavailable. One problem is the control of item exposure rate. Because adaptive algorithms are designed to select optimal items, they choose items with high discriminating power. Thus, these items are selected more often than others, leading to both overexposure and underutilization of some parts of the item pool. Overused items are often compromised, creating a security problem that could threaten the validity of a test. Building on a previously proposed stratification scheme to control the exposure rate for one-dimensional tests, the authors extend their method to multidimensional tests. A strategy is proposed based on stratification in accordance with a functional of the vector of the discrimination parameter, which can be implemented with minimal computational overhead. Both theoretical and empirical validation studies are provided. Empirical results indicate significant improvement over the commonly used method of controlling exposure rate that requires only a reasonable sacrifice in efficiency.