Kristine Arneson
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has continued
to raise the stakes for large scale educational assessment. Student level
tracking over time is becoming more important. Vertical scaling is the
development of a common scale of measurement across grade levels within a given
content area. This provides a way of tracking student growth from one grade to
the next. To create a vertical scale test items must be calibrated and linked
across grade levels. In this study, three methods for establishing a vertical
scale were examined. The three methods were separate, concurrent and pairwise calibration. The properties of the resulting
scales for each method were compared and discussed.