Multidimensional Linking: Four Practical Approaches.

This paper introduces and evaluates four practical multidimensional linking procedures that are based on theoretical framework recently proposed by Davey, Oshima, and lee (1996): (a) the Direct method, (b) the Equated Function method (c) the Test Characteristic Function (TCF) method, and (d) the Item Characteristic Function (ICF) method. The evaluation was conducted using simulated data. As anticipated, the competing procedures yielded different linking parameter estimates. The TCF and ICF methods were found to be more stable and recovered the true linking parameters better than the other two methods. Further-more, all procedures were found to be acceptable under almost any of the minimication criteria and offered dramatic improvement over not linking at all. It is recommended that the choice of a linking procedure should depend on the purpose of linking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]