While standardized tests play an increasingly important role in educational assessment in the Czech Republic, advanced psychometric methods are rarely used in processing data from these tests. Possible reasons could be that institutions responsible for testing in education are not familiar with recent progress in methods development, or they lack human and technical resources to perform advanced data analysis. The project therefore concentrated on facilitating access to modern psychometric methods and supporting their use in analysing data from administered tests, as well as in the process of creating and validating new tests.

The project mainly focused on developing a set of procedures and tools for complex analysis of educational tests using psychometric models. This set of procedures and tools consists of multiple interactive tools tailored for specific types of analyses. It further includes a set of text documents that describe the interactive tools, explain their functions, and demonstrate their use by providing practical data analysis examples. Both basic and advanced psychometric methods are implemented in the interactive tools, including item analysis methods, methods to detect between-group differences, text difficulty analysis methods, and computer adaptive testing methods. The interactive tools include toy datasets from educational tests to explore the methods, but they also allow uploading and analysing user-defined data. 

The following activities were performed as part of the project:

• Developing a set of procedures and tools for complex analysis of educational tests

• Regular meetings with the application guarantor
• Participative workshops for testing institutions, school leaders, and professionals in the field of educational assessment
• Presenting project outcomes at conferences and the project website

The project started in April 2021 and was completed in December 2023.