• Journal of Science Education
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.211-224
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• 2023

The purpose of this study is to suggest how to investigate the reliability of the assessment, which consists of items generated by automatic item generation using empirical example data. To achieve this, we analyzed the illustrative assessment data by applying the multivariate generalizability theory, which can reflect the design of responding to different items for each student and multiple error sources in the assessment score. The result of the G-study showed that, in most designs, the student effect corresponding to the true score of the classical test theory was relatively large after residual effects. In addition, in the design where the content domain was fixed, the ranking of students did not change depending on the item types or items. Similarly, in the design where the item format was fixed, the difficulty showed little variation depending on the content domains. The result of the D-study indicated that the original assessment data achieved a sufficient level of reliability. It was also found that higher reliability than the original assessment data could be obtained by reducing the number of items in the content domains of operation, geometry, and probability and statistics, or by assigning higher weights to the domains of letters and formulas, and function. The efficient measurement conditions presented in this study are limited to the illustrative assessment data. However, the method applied in this study can be utilized to determine the reliability and to find efficient measurement conditions for the various assessment situations using automatic item generation based on measurement traits.