A Review of Commercial Software Packages for Multidimensional IRT Modeling.

In this study, the authors evaluate several commercially available multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) software packages, including IRTPRO 2.1, Mplus 7.1, FlexMIRT, and EQSIRT, as well as their built-in estimation algorithms, and compare them for their performance in MIRT model estimation. The study examines the performance of model parameter recovery via a series of simulations based on four approaches for latent structuring—within-item MIRT, between-item MIRT, a mixture of within- and between-item MIRT and a bifactor model. The simulation studies focused on realistic conditions and models that researchers and practitioners are likely to encounter in practice. The results showed that the studied software packages recovered the item parameters reasonably well but differed greatly in terms of the types of data and models they could handle and also the run time required for estimation completion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]