Development of Rasch-based descriptive scale in profiling information professionals' competency

Abstract

The development of Rasch measurement model has rapidly expanded from social science, educational fields to other technology and engineering field as well. This study is an attempt to apply Rasch Measurement in the field of technology to assess Information Professionals' (IP) competency. Bloom's Taxonomy is used as the framework for assessment whilst utilising Rasch model in constructing the measurement in evaluating the competencies. Assessment only generates raw score and need to be transformed into meaningful measurement values. Rasch model measurement enable tabulation the IP; person and, a given task; the items, on a distribution map (PIDM) on a common scale termed logit. It gives a more accurate estimate of the IP 's achievement on a linear scale of measurement. Comparative analysis against the traditional histogram tabulation and simple mean shows that Rasch measurement was found to give a better exploratory' depth in understanding the ability oil each IP. Despite the small sample size, the IP were clearly categorized according to the respective workgroup cluster, knowledge and skills. This leads to a new paradigm in assessing competency of IP individuals using Rasch model. A new descriptive scale is developed to classify IP's by class intervals measured by Rasch Model.