The first half of 2011 has been quite busy at ASC. I have had the opportunity to visit Malaysia, India, and China for workshops on IRT and adaptive testing. It is exciting to see the growing interest for advanced psychometrics in those countries, and I am thankful to my friends for the chances to visit. ASC has also presented at two conferences this spring, the Association of Test Publishers and the National Council for Measurement in Education. Papers are available at our research page, http://www.assess.com/research.php.
ASc has also made major strides in its software. FastTEST Web (www.fasttestweb.com) has ever-expanding functionality, with a focus on item response theory and computerized adaptive testing. It remains the only publicly available platform for fully adaptive tests based on IRT. Another important release was Xcalibre 4.1 (http://www.assess.com/xcart/product.php?productid=569&cat=0&page=1&featured), which provides superior output for IRT analysis, as well as being the only IRT analysis program that is point-and-click. That is, no DOS-style command code is needed, which makes IRT much more accessible to researchers and practitioners in a wide variety of fields.
For more details on our software releases, workshops, and research, visit the ASC news page at http://www.assess.com/news.php.
