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. It is the aim of this project to facilitate access to modern psychometric methods and thus support their use in analysing data from administered tests, as well as in the process of creating and validating new tests.

The project mainly focuses on developing a set of procedures and tools for complex analysis of educational tests using psychometric models. This set of procedures and tools will consist of a text-based module and an interactive application module. Basic and advanced psychometric methods will be implemented in the interactive application module, including item analysis methods, methods to detect between-group differences, text difficulty analysis methods, computer adaptive testing methods, and test equating methods. The interactive application module will include toy datasets from educational tests to explore the methods, but it will also allow uploading and analysing user- defined data. The set of procedures and tools will, moreover, offer a model process of reporting assessment results and a function of automated creation of sample reports for tested persons, schools and other users. These reports will allow a choice of tables and graphs and they will also
include verbal descriptions to facilitate the interpretation of assessment results and their use as feedback.

The following activities are planned 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 will run until December 2023.