Test Item Definition

The performance test designed to simulate this situation would require that the student to be tested role play the professional’s part, while students or faculty act the other roles in the situation. Various aspects of the “professional’s” performance would then be observed and rated by several judges with the necessary background. The ratings could then be used both to provide the student with a diagnosis of his/her strengths and weaknesses and to contribute to an overall summary evaluation of the student’s abilities. This column shows the number of points given for each response alternative. For most tests, there will be one correct answer which will be given one point, but ScorePak® allows multiple correct alternatives, each of which may be assigned a different weight. A build list item challenges a candidate’s ability to identify and order the steps/tasks needed to perform a process or procedure.

The essay test is probably the most popular of all types of teacher-made tests. An essay test item can be classified as either an extended-response essay item or a short-answer essay item. The latter calls for a more restricted or limited answer in terms of form or scope. Item discrimination refers to the ability of an item to differentiate among students on the basis of how well they know the material being tested. Various hand calculation procedures have traditionally been used to compare item responses to total test scores using high and low scoring groups of students.

Similar to Types of test items and principles for constructing test items (

As you can see, I’m excluding tests that are annotated with java.io.Serializable. This is necessary because the profile will inherit the default config of the Surefire plugin, so even if you say or , the value com.test.annotation.type.IntegrationTest will be used. When you do a mvn clean test only your unmarked unit tests will run.

The following set of ICES (Instructor and Course Evaluation System) questionnaire items can be used to assess the quality of your test items. The items are presented with their original ICES catalogue number. You are encouraged to include one or more of the items on the ICES evaluation form in order to collect student opinion of your item writing quality.

System Testing Types

LOFT exams utilize automated item generation (AIG) to create large item banks. However, CITL staff members will consult with faculty who wish to analyze and improve their test item writing. The staff can also consult with faculty about other instructional problems. An urban planning board makes a last minute request for the professional to act as consultant and critique a written proposal which is to be considered in a board meeting that very evening. The professional arrives before the meeting and has one hour to analyze the written proposal and prepare his critique.

A general rule of thumb to predict the amount of change which can be expected in individual test scores is to multiply the standard error of measurement by 1.5. Only rarely would one expect a student’s test item definition score to increase or decrease by more than that amount between two such similar tests. The smaller the standard error of measurement, the more accurate the measurement provided by the test.

At the end of the Item Analysis report, test items are listed according their degrees of difficulty (easy, medium, hard) and discrimination (good, fair, poor). These distributions provide a quick overview of the test, and can be used to identify items which are not performing well and which can perhaps be improved or discarded. The test prompt (or question) is known as the “stem” for which you choose one or more of the answer options. As discussed above, remembering your audience when writing your test items can make or break your exam.

When coefficient alpha is applied to tests in which each item has only one correct answer and all correct answers are worth the same number of points, the resulting coefficient is identical to KR-20. Item discrimination indices must always be interpreted in the context of the type of test which is being analyzed. Items with low discrimination indices are often ambiguously worded and should be examined. Items with negative indices should be examined to determine why a negative value was obtained. For example, a negative value may indicate that the item was mis-keyed, so that students who knew the material tended to choose an unkeyed, but correct, response option.

• Two statistics are provided to evaluate the performance of the test as a whole.
• The second part shows statistics summarizing the performance of the test as a whole.
• Use at least four alternatives for each item to lower the probability of getting the item correct by guessing.
• Computerized analyses provide more accurate assessment of the discrimination power of items because they take into account responses of all students rather than just high and low scoring groups.
• A performance test item is designed to assess the ability of a student to perform correctly in a simulated situation (i.e., a situation in which the student will be ultimately expected to apply his/her learning).

ST is known as a superset of all sorts of testing since it covers all of the primary types of testing. Although the emphasis on different forms of testing varies according to the product, the organization’s procedures, the timetable, and the needs. Each test-item writing activity should be reported for a maximum of a 12-month period.

The item discrimination index provided by ScorePak® is a Pearson Product Moment correlation2 between student responses to a particular item and total scores on all other items on the test. This index is the equivalent of a point-biserial coefficient in this application. It provides an estimate of the degree to which an individual item is measuring the same thing as the rest of the items. The standard deviation, or S.D., is a measure of the dispersion of student scores on that item.