In this practical, easy-to-use guide, suggestions are made for setting educational objectives and preparing a teacher-made test. Specific suggestions are made for selecting items for essay tests, multiple choice tests, completion tests, matching tests, and true-false tests. (BW)

Achievement test reliability as a function of ability was determined for multiple sections of a large university French class (n=193). A 5-option multiple-choice examination was constructed, least attractive distractors were eliminated based on the instructor's judgment, and the resulting three forms of the examination (i.e. 3-, 4-, or 5-choice…

Effects of Test-Wiseness (TW) training and level of TW on multiple-choice item type performance, on standardized and teacher-made examinations in undergraduate medical education were considered. Conditions inherent in standardized tests must be present before a susceptibility to the extraneous source of variance of TW is evidenced. (Author/GK)

The effectiveness of the Coombs elimination procedure was evaluated with 29 college students enrolled in a statistics course. Five multiple-choice tests were employed and scored using the Coombs procedure. Results suggest that the Coombs procedure decreased guessing, and this effect increased over the grading period. (Author/LMO)

This set of materials represents the first three workshops in a series of five designed to assist school districts and educators to develop their own curriculum-referenced tests. The series has been assembled to provide school districts with a relatively inexpensive test development method. The series is designed to reduce costs by pooling…

Multiple-choice tests are here to stay. They should do more than test for rote memory. They should simultaneously test for both knowledge of subject matter and for thinking skills applied to that subject matter. Suggestions to help teachers prepare better test questions are made. (RM)

Outlines the benefits associated with true-false and multiple-choice tests and sets forth rules for writing effective items for such tests. (FL)

Discusses the advantages and disadvantages of multiple-choice tests, steps in developing good questions, and common pitfalls. Argues that carefully constructed multiple-choice questions can assess a wide variety of skills including higher-order thinking skills. Suggests that creating a good multiple-choice test starts with a description of the…

Commercial achievement tests often provide limited instructional guidance and seldom provide feedback specific to any given classroom. The most instructionally relevant achievement tests are those developed by an individual teacher for use with a particular class. This digest describes the steps of test construction and presents suggestions for…

Methods for detecting copying of multiple-choice test responses are reviewed and compared with respect to their effectiveness and the practicality of their application for groups of varying sizes. Reasons why effective detection methods are seldom applied in standardized and classroom testing are discussed. (SLD)

Analysis of educational psychology textbooks identified textbook authors' guidelines for teachers to follow when writing multiple-choice test items. Selected guidelines were used to evaluate multiple-choice items (N=1,080) from 18 college instructor guides to educational psychology texts. Results indicated that approximately 60 percent of the…

Describes how multiple-choice items can be designed and used as an effective diagnostic tool by avoiding their pitfalls and by taking advantage of their potential benefits. The following issues are discussed: correct' versus best answers; construction of diagnostic multiple-choice items; the problem of guessing; the use of justifications of…

Investigates the effects on multiple choice test performance of altering the order and placement of questions and responses. Shows that changing the response pattern appears to alter significantly the apparent degree of difficulty. Response patterns become more dissimilar under certain types of response alterations. (LS)

This article presents the perspective that the quality of teacher-made, small classroom tests has not improved, and may have declined in recent years. This decline may be due to the fact that teachers have come to believe that the kinds of objective items used in national standardized tests are the only item types appropriate for classroom use.…

This paper reports a multi-method approach for examining the cognitive level of multiple-choice items used in a medical pathology course at a large midwestern medical school. Analysis of the standard item analysis data and think-out-loud reports of a sample of students completing a 66 item examination were used to test assumptions related to the…