This analysis of the National Certifying Examination for Operating Room Technicians revealed that examinee's performance was related to their educational preparation. Utilizing test results from 2,841 candidates, the performance of first time candidates was compared to the performance of graduates of one or two-year programs and of technicians who…

Two studies were conducted of the effects of sex biased items on achievement test scores obtained by male and female college students. Sex bias was defined as a disproportionate number of references to one sex. Study I used 1,008 classroom test items. Items were classified as male sex referent, female sex referent, no sex referent (neutral), or…

Prior research has indicated that items administered to college students for rating their instructors, can be empirically as well as logically classified on a continuum from very general to specific. Three of these hypothesized classifications of item specificity--global, general concept, and specific--were chosen to represent this continuum.…

Latent trait theory is used as a basis for a definition of item bias, and an experiment is described in which a test of vocabulary items was not found to be biased when administered to two groups of high school students, one group of 58 black students and the other 168 white students. The experiment for the detection of bias began with separate…

A sixth-grade mathematics test was evaluated in two different ways, and the evaluations were compared. One method of evaluation was to use the Rasch model for item analysis and to accept or reject items on the basis of the extent to which the data fit the model. The other method of evaluation was to ask school superintendents and teachers to rate…

Since grade-appropriate levels of standardized achievement tests must frequently be used in Elementary and Secondary Education Act Title I evaluations, there may be large discrepancies between test difficulty and the achievement level of those being tested, with resultant inaccuracies in the scores. Procedures based on the Rasch scaling model were…

The function and structure of a data base system called RIBYT (Review It Before You Test) is described. RIBYT simultaneously controls and associates questions in question pools for many courses of instruction. The data base stores questions created by both faculty and students and is used for formal testing and student self-assessment. The…

Using informal, objectives-based, or linguistic methods, three elementary school teachers and three experienced item writers developed criterion-referenced pretests-posttests to accompany a prose passage. Item difficulites were tabulated on the responses of 364 elementary students. The informal-subjective method, used by many achievement test…

A general process for testing the feasibility of applying alternative mathematical or statistical models to the solution of a practical problem is presented and flowcharted. The system is used to compare five models for test equating: (1) anchor test equating using classical test theory; (2) anchor test equating using the one-parameter logistic…

The Evaluation of Student Achievement is a course required of all education majors at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. It covers construction of classroom objectives and related test items, test administration, item analysis, statistical analysis, and assignment of grades. Among other assignments, students were required to:…

The Institutional Renewal Scale (IRS) is a twelve-items attitude scale designed to measure attitudes toward educational innovation in schools. The development of the scale is described and a copy of the scale is included. Items were selected on the basis of both scale values and discrimination indices. A comparison was made between the scores of…

The implications of a mathematical model of test scores are explored where the data are limited to a random sample of items without replacement from an indefinitely large population or item domain in which items are scored either zero or one. The purpose is to obtain an unbiased estimate of a student's proportion of items correct in the item…

Latent trait models may offer considerable potential for the improvement of educational measurement practices, but until recently, they have received only limited attention from measurement specialists. This paper provides a brief introduction to latent trait models, and provides test practitioners with a non-technical introduction to the…

To aid in the construction of effective task analysis inventories, this technical report discusses: (1) an optimum questionnaire length that adequately covers Marine tasks without unduly fatiguing respondents; (2) procedures for the phrasing of task statements to avoid ambiguities and be understandable to as broad a range of Marines as is…

Mexican American and Anglo secondary school teacher perceptions of Mexican American students were investigated and compared. The instrument used to retrieve the data was administered to 112 teachers in the three Dona Ana (N.M.) county school districts. Six constructs resulted from the factor analysis of the instrument, namely, achievement, time…