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Rasch model

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 5:31 AM, Iasonas Lamprianou
<lamprianou at yahoo.com> wrote:
As far as I know the conditional modes of the random effects for
students should correspond to the student ability estimates from
marginal maximum likelihood.  However, I don't know much about
commercial Rasch packages calculate these parameters.

With more items is becomes reasonable to model both the item easiness
and the pupil abilities as random effects which is not easily done in
commercial packages.  There is a chapter in the book "Exploratory Item
Response Models" describing the model and why it is desirable but
without indication of how it could be fit.  In the paper

@article{Dowling:Bliese:Bates:Doran:2007:JSSOBK:v20i02,
  author =	"Harold Doran and Douglas Bates and Paul Bliese and Maritza
 Dowling",
  title =	"Estimating the Multilevel Rasch Model: With the lme4 Package",
  journal =	"Journal of Statistical Software",
  volume =	"20",
  number =	"2",
  pages =	"1--18",
  day =  	"22",
  month =	"2",
  year = 	"2007",
  CODEN =	"JSSOBK",
  ISSN = 	"1548-7660",
  bibdate =	"2007-02-22",
  URL =  	"http://www.jstatsoft.org/v20/i02",
  accepted =	"2007-02-22",
  acknowledgement = "",
  keywords =	"",
  submitted =	"2006-10-01",
}

we show how to fit that model and generalizations of it where items
and/or subjects fall into groups.  Also, there are several slides in
the section "Item Response Models as GLMMs" of the workshop
presentation at http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~bates/UseR2008/WorkshopD.pdf
related to fitting Rasch models with crossed random effects.