Background/purpose: The purposes of this research are to develop a reliable and valid assessment tool for measuring systems thinking skills in upper primary students in Thailand and to establish a normative criterion for evaluating their systems thinking abilities based on educational standards. Materials/methods: The study followed a three-phase…

Multiple-select multiple-choice items, or multiple-choice items with more than one correct answer, are used to quickly assess content on standardized assessments. Because there are multiple keys to these item types, there are also multiple ways to score student responses to these items. The purpose of this study was to investigate how changing the…

This qualitative study looks at multiple-choice questions (MCQs) in examinations and their effectiveness in testing higher-order cognition. While there are claims that MCQs can do this, we consider many assertions problematic because of the difficulty in interpreting what higher-order cognition consists of and whether or not assessment tasks…

Standardized conceptual assessment represents a widely used tool for educational researchers interested in student learning within the standard undergraduate physics curriculum. For example, these assessments are often used to measure student learning across educational contexts and instructional strategies. However, to support the large-scale…

Chemistry faculty members are highly skilled in obtaining, analyzing, and interpreting physical measurements, but often they are less skilled in measuring student learning. This work provides guidance for chemistry faculty from the research literature on multiple-choice item development in chemistry. Areas covered include content, stem, and…

Helping students develop a sound understanding of scientific concepts can be a major challenge. Lately, learning progressions have received increasing attention as a means to support students in developing understanding of core scientific concepts. At the center of a learning progression is a sequence of developmental levels reflecting an…

In this article we discuss the findings of our research on students' understanding of vector concepts in problems without physical context. First, we develop a complete taxonomy of the most frequent errors made by university students when learning vector concepts. This study is based on the results of several test administrations of open-ended…

The nature of anatomy education has changed substantially in recent decades, though the traditional multiple-choice written examination remains the cornerstone of assessing students' knowledge. This study sought to measure the quality of a clinical anatomy multiple-choice final examination using item response theory (IRT) models. One hundred…

For educational achievement tests that employ multiple-choice (MC) items and aim to reliably classify students into performance categories, it is critical to design MC items that are capable of discriminating student performance according to the stated achievement levels. This is accomplished, in part, by clearly understanding how item design…

There have been many attempts to formulate a procedure for extracting information from incorrect responses to multiple choice items, i.e., the assessment of partial knowledge. The results of these attempts can be described as inconsistent at best. It is hypothesized that these inconsistencies arise from three methodological problems: the…

An alternative to multiple-choice (MC) testing is suggested as it pertains to the field of radiologic technology education. General principles for writing MC questions are given and contrasted with a new type of MC question, the alternate-choice (AC) question, in which the answer choices are embedded in the question in a short form that resembles…

A study compared student performance on language-usage test items embedded in a passage when the location of the answer was varied. American College Testing (ACT) Assessment experimental units were constructed that presented 35 items whose sequence of foils was varied so that each foil appeared once as the "no change" option embedded in…

National Assessment is a data gathering project designed to provide information, in ten subject areas, about knowledge, skills, understandings and attitudes of young people in this country, and to assess changes in these variables over time. The data is collected and reported at the item level. Each exercise was developed with emphasis on content…

Presented in this symposium reader are nine papers, four of which deal with the theory and impact of the Rasch model on language testing and five of which discuss final examinations in secondary schools in both general and specific terms. The papers are: "Introduction to Rasch Measurement: Some Implications for Language Testing" (J. J.…

This material provides a discussion of the construction and analysis of tests prepared for classroom use by teachers. The initial discussion is concerned with the purposes of evaluation and the specification of objectives. This is followed by an examination of theoretical and practical considerations in planning a test. The material on test item…