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Research Article

Goodman–Kruskal gamma and Dimension-Corrected Gamma in Educational Measurement Settings

Jari Metsämuuronen

Although Goodman–Kruskal gamma (G) is used relatively rarely it has promising potential as a coefficient of association in educational settings..

A

Although Goodman–Kruskal gamma (G) is used relatively rarely it has promising potential as a coefficient of association in educational settings.  Characteristics of G are studied in three sub-studies related to educational measurement settings. G appears to be unexpectedly appealing as an estimator of association between an item and a score because it strictly indicates the probability to get a correct answer in the test item given the score, and it accurately produces perfect latent association irrespective of distributions, degrees of freedom, number of tied pairs and tied values in the variables, or the difficulty levels in the items. However, it underestimates the association in an obvious manner when the number of categories in the item is more than four. Towards this, a dimension-corrected G (G2) is proposed and its characteristics are studied. Both G and G2 appear to be promising alternatives in measurement modelling settings, G with binary items and G2 with binary, polytomous and mixed datasets.

Keywords: Item analysis, Goodman–Kruskal gamma, Somers D, Jonckheere–Terpstra test, Pearson correlation.

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