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A practical evaluation method using item response theory to evaluate children’s form of Jumping-over and crawling-under

In order to develop the test battery evaluating the movement of Jumping-over and crawling-under for young children, we measured and videotaped it performed by 350 kindergarten children. After that, 16 movements by body part were assess using three categories of “possible,” “no idea” and “impossible.” Since the change of eigenvalues derived from this data represented a one-dimensional structure having a high homogeneous each other, successively, the parameters of step difficulty and samples were computed using IRT. Among various IRT models, this study used Partial Credit model because obtained data is ordinal and the sample size is few. Then we found the outcomes as follows: 1) The correlation between the two sets of parameters of step difficulty computed from two sets of randomly divided samples was high, so that it can be concluded that the difficulty parameters are not depended on any ability level of samples. Again, the correlation between the two sets of sample parameters calculated from two groups of randomly grouped item parameters was also significant. This fact allowed us to conclude the obtained sample parameters did not depend on any difficulty level of items. 2) As significant difference between ages in obtained thetas was found, it is considered that thetas reflect motor ability that advances with maturity. There was also high correlation between thetas and measurements of Jumping-over and crawling-under. 3) Judging from information function consisting of 16 items, this test is suitable to determine the ability with from middle to a little low level because the information reached around there. 4) A practical estimation and evaluation sheet utilizing thetas by total score based on Zhu and Cole (1996) was developed and the application examples were represented. 5) As a result that the relationship between strictly computed indexes of fitness and the number of aberrant patterns detected in the practical method in this study was examined, the high correlation was found. Judging from this fact, it can be concluded that IRT is useful to estimate and evaluate the movement of Jumping-over and crawling-under.

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