Recent reform efforts in undergraduate biology have recommended transforming course exams to test at more cognitively challenging levels, which may mean including more cognitively challenging and more constructed-response questions on assessments. However, changing the characteristics of exams could result in bias against historically underserved…

Teachers' professional knowledge is assumed to be a key variable for effective teaching. As teacher education has the goal to enhance professional knowledge of current and future teachers, this knowledge should be described and assessed. Nevertheless, only a limited number of studies quantitatively measures physics teachers' professional…

Three-item orderings and two levels of knowledge of ordering were used to study differences in test results, student's perception of the test's fairness and difficulty, and student's estimation of test performance. No significant order effect was found. (Author/GK)

This study compared the item difficulty, item discrimination, and test reliability of three forms of multiple-choice items: (1) one correct answer; (2) "none of the above" as a foil; and (3) "none of the above" as the correct answer. Twelve items in the three formats were administered in a college statistics examination. (BS)

Two forms of an undergraduate examination were constructed. Tests varied with respect to item truth value (true, false) and method of phrasing (positive, negative). Negatively stated items were more difficult but not more discriminating than positively stated items. False items were not more difficult but were more discriminating than true items.…

Differential test performance by undergraduate males and females enrolled in a developmental educational psychology course (n=167) was reported on a quantitative examination as a function of item arrangement. Males were expected to perform better than females on tests whose items arranged easy to hard. Plake and Ansorge (1982) speculated this may…

A study involving undergraduate college students enrolled in an introductory psychology course showed that test item arrangement by difficulty or by order of content presentation has no effect on total achievement test score. The data also fail to demonstrate any influence of test item order on student perception of test difficulty. (RM)

A comparison of double as opposed to single multiple-choice questions yielded significant differences in regard to item difficulty, item discrimination, and internal reliability, but not concurrent validity. (Author/PN)

Multiple-choice tests composed entirely of two-, three-, or four-choice items were investigated. Results indicated that number of alternatives per item was inversely related to item difficulty, but directly related to item discrimination. Reliability and standard error of measurement of three-choice item tests was equivalent or superior.…

This study compared item difficulty and item discrimination indices for parallel multiple-choice items in three content areas: measurement concepts, statistical terminology, and synonyms. The statistics and measurement items were administered in classes where graduate students taking the test were studying the content. Vocabulary items represented…

Effects of item arrangement (easy-hard, uniform, and random), test anxiety, and sex on a 48-item multiple-choice mathematics test assembled from items of the American College Testing Program and taken by motivated upper level undergraduates and beginning graduate students were investigated. Four measures of anxiety were used: the Achievement Test…

Number right and elimination scores were analyzed on a college level mathematics exam assembled from pretest data. Anxiety measures were administered along with the experimental forms to undergraduates. Results suggest that neither test scores nor attitudes are influenced by item order knowledge thereof, or anxiety level. (Author/GK)

Studied the cognitive equivalence of computerized and paper-and-pencil reading comprehension tests using verbal protocol analysis. Results for 48 college students indicate that the only significant difference between the computerized and paper-and-pencil tests was in the frequency of identifying important information in the passage. (SLD)

The purpose of this study was to determine whether it is both possible and cost-effective to revise middle-difficulty Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) discrete items in order to produce items of higher or lower difficulty. The basic procedure was to select items of a given difficulty and, by revising the distractors, make them easier or more…

Forty-five graduate students in two educational psychology classes were randomly assigned to three groups for a classroom test on the course content. One group was asked to go to another room and then was privately excused from the test. The other two groups took tests with the same 32 items, but one group used a multiple-choice format and the…