This digest presents a list of recommendations for writing multiple-choice test items, based on psychometrics statistics are typically provided by a measurement, or test scoring, service, where tests are machine-scored or by testing software packages. Test makers can capitalize on the fact that "bad" items can be differentiated from…

The Listener Preference Profile (LPP) was designed to identify habitual listening responses. Items for the LPP were generated from listening behaviors identified from a systematic review of the listening literature and modified based on administration to several pilot groups. Results of factor analyses identified four clusters (people-, content-,…

Finds that many commercial reading comprehension test items are not passage dependent. (RB)

A multiple choice test containing items published by the American Chemical Society Examinations Committee was administered to beginning Master's Degree students in chemistry at the University of Poona, India. Item analysis of the test revealed that it was satisfactory for distinguishing between good and poor students. (MLH)

A two-factor analysis of variance with multiple measurements on one factor was conducted among the 40 items of the Vocabulary test of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) for six language groups. All sources of variance were found significant beyond the one per cent level. (Author/RC)

Presents details of construction and initial validation of a likert scale for assessing attitude toward six categories of school life with particular emphasis on school lunch. (Author/RC)

This paper describes an approach to item analysis that is based on the estimation of a set of response curves for each item. The response curves show, at a glance, the difficulty and the discriminating power of the item and the popularity of each distractor, at any level of the criterion variable (e.g., total score). The curves are estimated by…

An alternative definition has been developed of the delta scale of item difficulty used at Educational Testing Service. The traditional delta scale uses an inverse normal transformation based on normal ogive models developed years ago. However, no use is made of this fact in typical uses of item deltas. It is simply one way to make the probability…

The models and procedures discussed in this paper are related to those presented in Bock and Aitkin (1981), where they considered the 2-parameter probit model and approximated a normally distributed prior distribution of abilities by a finite and discrete distribution. One purpose of this paper is to clarify the nature of the general EM (GEM)…

An experimental test battery (the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation battery) designed to measure numerical facility was administered to 1,451 subjects at 12 testing centers across the United States over a 5-month period. Five work samples were included: (1) arithmetic; (2) counting backwards; (3) number reasoning; (4) rule learning; and (5)…

The stability of selected indices for detecting differential item performance (item bias), from one randomly equivalent sample to another, is addressed. Some recent research has criticized these indices as too unreliable for utility in measuring bias in achievement test items. Using data from a national testing of the ACT Assessment, however, this…

Rescoring of Center for Occupational and Professional Assessment objective-referenced tests is decided largely by content experts selected by client organizations. A few of the test items, statistically flagged for review, are not rescored. Some of this incongruence could be due to the use of the biserial correlation (r-biserial) as an…

This research brief summarizes the available reliability and validity data available in, but spread throughout, a number of General Educational Development (GED) Testing Service publications. A section on reliability discusses how to determine reliability of a test's scores and two ways of assessing the reliability of a test--internal consistency…

A study was conducted to determine the validity of two separate item classification schemes for the reading comprehension subtest of the McGraw-Hill Test of Adult Basic Education, Level D, Form 4. The first of the two schemes was developed by the publisher and presented as a means of classifying errors for the purpose of diagnosing individual…

Data from the Scholastic Aptitude Test-Verbal (SAT-V), SAT Mathematics (SAT-M), and Achievement Tests in Biology, American History, and Social Studies were used for this study. The temporal stability of item parameter estimates obtained for the same set of items calibrated for different examinees at different times was analyzed. It was believed…