Unlike other systems of adaptive testing, multistage testing (MST) provides many benefits of adaptive testing and linear testing, and has become the most sought-after form for computerized testing in educational assessment recently. It is greatly fit for testing educational achievement and can be adapted to practical educational surveys testing. However, there are many practical considerations for MST design for operational implementations including costs and benefits. As a practitioner, we need to start with various simulations to evaluate the various MST designs and their performances before the implementations. A recently developed statistical tool mstR, an open source R package, was released to support the researchers and practitioners to aid their MST simulations for implementations.

Conventional MST design has three stages of module (i.e., 1-2-3 design) structure. Alternatively, the composition of modules diverges from one design to another (e.g., 1-3 design). For advance planning of equivalence studies, this paper utilizes both 1-2-3 design and 1-3 design for the MST structures. In order to study the broad structure of these values, this paper evaluates the different MST designs through simulations using the R package mstR. The empirical simulation study provides an introductory overview of mstR and describes what mstR offers using different MST structures from 2PL item bank. Further comparisons will show the advantages of the different MST designs (e.g., 1-2-3 design and 1-3 design) for different practical implementations.

As an open-source statistical environment R, mstR provides a great simulation tool and allows psychologists, social scientists, and educational measurement scientists to apply it to innovative future assessments in the operational use of MST.