The International Cognitive Ability Resource (ICAR)
In 2014 The Psychometrics Centre was awarded a 3-year project grant under the ORA Plus Scheme (3rd round) to develop the International Cognitive Ability Resource (ICAR), a public-domain and open-source tool that will provide a large and dynamic bank of cognitive ability measures for use in a wide variety of applications.
ICAR will build heavily on automatic item generation techniques that yield items with predictable psychometric qualities. These will be distributed as functions in psychometrically-informed, easily-implemented, open-source software. In addition, suitable statistical methodologies will be developed and sub-projects will use ICAR items to explore specific research questions.
ORA PLus is a collaboration between several European funding bodies (ESRC in the UK, ANR in France, DFG in Germany, and NWO in the Netherlands) and the NSF in the United States. Our ICAR international collaborators are Philipp Doebler and Heinz Holling from the University of Munster, and David Condon and William Revelle from North Western University, Illinois, USA. It will receive further contribution from international collaborators, including Beijing Normal University, China, MIMOS National R&D Centre in ICT, Malaysia, Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK, and the University of Sao Francisco, Brazil.