The Science Assessment Program is part of the overall Manitoba assessment program as recommended by the Joint Committee on Evaluation and approved by the Minster of Education and Training. This report contains a description and analysis, along with conclusions and recommendations of the assessment conducted in Science 100, Biology 200, and Physics…

The lack of systematic psychometric information on the Suicide Opinion Questionnaire (SOQ) was addressed by investigating the factor structure and reliability of the eight-factor clinical scale model (mental illness, cry for help, right to die, religion, impulsivity, normality, aggression, and moral evil), developed for interpreting responses to…

Items of Altemeyer's 1986 version of the "Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale" (RWA Scale) were analyzed as philosophical propositions in an effort to establish each item's suggestive connotation and denotation. The guiding principle of the analysis was the way in which the statements reflected authoritarianism's defining characteristics…

The Mooney Problem Check List, College Form, was administered to 2,261 students from six Louisiana universities, for standardization purposes. Usable protocols were obtained for 1,929 subjects. Comparisons among schools, school classes, sex, race, and marital status were made for the 11 Mooney categories. Norm tables were developed for all groups…

Item analysis procedures appropriate for domain-referenced classroom testing are described. A conceptual framework within which item statistics can be considered and promising statistics in light of this framework are presented. The sampling fluctuations of the more promising item statistics for sample sizes comparable to the typical classroom…

Traditionally, the psychometric qualities of instruments used in guidance research are not reported and concerns of validity are passed over lightly. This article examines this problem by delineating instrument development from the identification of content through initial validation processes. Procedures for item selection, item validation, and…

Intuitive and statistical procedures were combined to construct 10 scales for measuring child personality. Four independent samples were used in the construction: clinic, psychotic, normative and general abnormal. The scales were judged to be internally consistent, potentially applicable to clinical decision making, and require empirical…

Two issues in the writing of multiple-choice test items were investigated: a comparison of three versus four options; and the use of the inclusive "none of these" option versus a content option. Subjects were 220 introductory psychology students, who were enrolled at a large southwestern university, responding to a final examination in psychology…

A plausible "s"-factor solution for many types of psychological and educational tests is one in which there is one general factor and "s - 1" group- or method-related factors. The bi-factor solution results from the constraint that each item has a non-zero loading on the primary dimension "alpha(sub j1)" and at most…

This study describes preliminary work on the development of a scale to assess attitude toward public drinking involvement. A sample of 46 students at a west-coast university participated in the study. Respondents completed a questionnaire containing a measure of Attitude Toward Public Drinking Involvement Scale (ATPDIS) and various validity…

A target partition analysis (TPA) was used to help seven subject matter experts, with little expertise in testing, evaluate relationships among test items. The subjects were experts in Income Maintenance in the field of public assistance work; they were trainers affiliated with the Professional Development Program's Income Maintenance Training…

A new approach to polychotomous scoring of test items, similar to "max-alpha" scaling (MAS) and known as polyweighting, has been developed. Unlike MAS, this new method of polychotomous scoring provides scoring weights for a given item that are independent of the difficulty of other items in the analysis. Moreover, the scoring weights are…

This study empirically examined the proposition that different item selection procedures contribute to the development of achievement tests that optimally serve different purposes. A test of 110 addition and subtraction problems was given to a sample of 371 first-grade students. Three subsets of 30 items were selected from this 110-item test. The…

Confirmatory multidimensional item response theory (CMIRT) was used to assess the structure of the Graduate Record Examination General Test, about which much information about factorial structure exists, using a sample of 1,001 psychology majors taking the test in 1984 or 1985. Results supported previous findings that, for this population, there…

The proposition that the optimal number of options in a multiple choice test item is three was examined. The concept of functional distractor, a plausible wrong answer that is negatively discriminating when total test performance is the criterion, is discussed. Three distinct groups of achievers (high, middle, and low) on a national standardized…