We will start off the paper by talking a little bit about the psychological aspects of ICL, models, and a platform that it is based on.  Most of what people are familiar with in assessment are based on trait and behavioral motive psychology. This educational measurement paradigm accounts for how most test developers and psychometricians (we wouldn’t be far from the truths saying more than 90 %) think about educational assessment, how they design it, and how they build it into policy and instructional decisions.

Under this paradigm, the assessment consists of a bunch of self-encapsulated items that the test-takers attempt.  These items have been designed often intuitively by item writers who know a lot about the area to elicit a nugget of evidence that will give a clue about the construct of interest.  Usually, each of those item responses is evaluated to produce an item score-right or wrong.  Those scores are combined into what is traditionally thought of as a test score- most of the time adding item-responses up to the examinee’s total sum. Sometimes a little fancier method is used, like item response theory – the scores are added up and then applied a logistic transformation basically.