Historical Background for Multidimensional Item Response Theory (MIRT)

Abstract

Item response theory (IRT) is a general framework for specifying mathematical functions that describe the interactions of persons and test items. It has a long history, but its popularity is generally attributed to the work of Fredrick Lord and Georg Rasch starting in the 1950s and 1960s.Multidimensional item response the-ory (MIRT) is a special case of IRT that is built on the premise that themathematical function includes as parameters a vector of multiple person characteristics that de-scribe the skills and knowledge that the person brings to a test and a vector of item characteristics that describes the difficulty of the test item and the sensitivity of the test item to differences in the characteristics of the persons. MIRT also has a long history, going back to the work of Darrel Bock, Paul Horst, Roderick McDonald, Bengt Muthen, Fumiko Samajima, and others starting in the 1970s.