Contributions to test-item bank design and management

An item bank is a collection of items (test questions) along with their psychometric parameters, such as item-discrimination, item-difculty, and item-guessing (for the 3PL IRT model), and other attributes such as word counts, categorical attributes, expected response times, and the dates of administration. From an item bank, tests are assembled according to test specications. Mathematical programming techniques or heuristic methods can be employed to select items from the bank. Because of this, item bank is a valuable resource for any testing program whose tests are offered on a continual basis.