H. Huynh et S. Ferrara, A COMPARISON OF EQUAL PERCENTILE AND PARTIAL CREDIT EQUATINGS FOR PERFORMANCE-BASED ASSESSMENTS COMPOSED OF FREE-RESPONSE ITEMS, Journal of educational measurement, 31(2), 1994, pp. 125-141
This study compares the equal percentile (EP) and partial credit (PC)
equatings for raw scores derived from performance-based assessments co
mposed of free-response (open-ended) items clustered around long readi
ng selections or multistep mathematics problems. Data are from the Mar
yland School Performance Assessment Program. The results suggest that
Masters' (1982; Wright & Masters, 1982) partial credit model may be us
eful for equating examinations composed of moderately easy (or not too
difficult) items sharing a first principal component with at least 25
% of the total variance. This conclusion appears to hold even in the p
resence of some level of response dependency for the items within each
cluster. Although visible discrepancies were found between PC and EP
equated scores in the skewed tail of the score distributions, the dire
ction of these discrepancies is unpredictable. Therefore, it cannot be
concluded from the study that the two methods give equivalent results
when the distributions are markedly skewed.