Invariant Measurement

This introductory text describes the principles of invariant measurement, how invariant measurement can be achieved with Rasch models, and how to use invariant measurement to solve measurement problems in the social, behavioral, and health sciences. Rasch models are used throughout but a comparison of Rasch models to other item response theory (IRT) models is also provided. Written with students in mind, the manuscript was class tested to help maximize accessibility. Chapters open with an introduction and close with a summary and discussion. Numerous examples and exercises demonstrate the main issues addressed in each chapter. Key terms are defined when first introduced and in an end-of-text glossary. All of the book’s analyses were conducted with the Facets program. The data sets used in the book, sample syntax files for running the Facets program, Excel files for creating item and person response functions, links to related websites, and other material are available at www.GeorgeEngelhard.com. Highlights include: A strong philosophical and methodological approach to measurement in the human sciences Demonstrations of how measurement problems can be addressed using invariant measurement Practical illustrations of how to create and evaluate scales using invariant measurement A history of measurement based on test-score and scaling traditions Previously unpublished work in analyzing rating data, the detection and measurement of rater errors, and the evaluation of rater accuracy A review of estimation methods, model-data fit, indices used to evaluate the quality of rater-mediated assessments, rater error and bias, and rater accuracy. Intended as a supplementary text for graduate or advanced undergraduate courses on measurement or test theory, item response theory, scaling theory, psychometrics, advanced measurement techniques, research methods, or evaluation research taught in education, psychology, and the social and health sciences, the book also appeals to practitioners and researchers in these fields who develop or use scales and instruments. Only a basic mathematical level is required including a basic course in statistic.

The purpose of this book is to present methods for developing, evaluating and maintaining rater-mediated assessment systems. Rater-mediated assessments involve ratings that are assigned by raters to persons responding to constructed-response items (e.g., written essays and teacher portfolios) and other types of performance assessments. This book addresses the following topics: (1) introduction to the principles of invariant measurement, (2) application of the principles of invariant measurement to rater-mediated assessments, (3) description of the lens model for rater judgments, (4) integration of principles of invariant measurement with the lens model of cognitive processes of raters, (5) illustration of substantive and psychometric issues related to rater-mediated assessments in terms of validity, reliability, and fairness, and (6) discussion of theoretical and practical issues related to rater-mediated assessment systems. Invariant measurement is fast becoming the dominant paradigm for assessment systems around the world, and this book provides an invaluable resource for graduate students, measurement practitioners, substantive theorists in the human sciences, and other individuals interested in invariant measurement when judgments are obtained with rating scales.

This is a heretofore unpublished set of lecture notes by the late John von Neumann on invariant measures, including Haar measures on locally compact groups. The notes for the first half of the book have been prepared by Paul Halmos. The second half of the book includes a discussion of Kakutani's very interesting approach to invariant measures.

The purpose of this book is to present methods for developing, evaluating and maintaining rater-mediated assessment systems. Rater-mediated assessments involve ratings that are assigned by raters to persons responding to constructed-response items (e.g., written essays and teacher portfolios) and other types of performance assessments. This book addresses the following topics: (1) introduction to the principles of invariant measurement, (2) application of the principles of invariant measurement to rater-mediated assessments, (3) description of the lens model for rater judgments, (4) integration of principles of invariant measurement with the lens model of cognitive processes of raters, (5) illustration of substantive and psychometric issues related to rater-mediated assessments in terms of validity, reliability, and fairness, and (6) discussion of theoretical and practical issues related to rater-mediated assessment systems. Invariant measurement is fast becoming the dominant paradigm for assessment systems around the world, and this book provides an invaluable resource for graduate students, measurement practitioners, substantive theorists in the human sciences, and other individuals interested in invariant measurement when judgments are obtained with rating scales.

This book is devoted to some topics of the general theory of invariant and quasi-invariant measures. Such measures are usually defined on various sigma-algebras of subsets of spaces equipped with transformation groups, and there are close relationships between purely algebraic properties of these groups and the corresponding properties of invariant (quasi-invariant) measures. The main goal of the book is to investigate several aspects of those relationships (primarily from the set-theoretical point of view). Also of interest are the properties of some natural classes of sets, important from the viewpoint of the theory of invariant (quasi-invariant) measures.

This book provides some recent advance in the study of stochastic nonlinear Schrödinger equations and their numerical approximations, including the well-posedness, ergodicity, symplecticity and multi-symplecticity. It gives an accessible overview of the existence and uniqueness of invariant measures for stochastic differential equations, introduces geometric structures including symplecticity and (conformal) multi-symplecticity for nonlinear Schrödinger equations and their numerical approximations, and studies the properties and convergence errors of numerical methods for stochastic nonlinear Schrödinger equations. This book will appeal to researchers who are interested in numerical analysis, stochastic analysis, ergodic theory, partial differential equation theory, etc.

The main purpose of this paper is to prove the existence, and in some cases the uniqueness, of unitarily invariant measures on formal completions of groups associated to affine Kac-Moody algebras, and associated homogeneous spaces. The basic invariant measure is a natural generalization of Haar measure for a simply connected compact Lie group, and its projection to flag spaces is a generalization of the normalized invariant volume element. The other ``invariant measures'' are actually measures having values in line bundles over these spaces; these bundle-valued measures heuristically arise from coupling the basic invariant measure to Hermitian structures on associated line bundles, but in this infinite dimensional setting they are generally singular with respect to the basic invariant measure.