The purpose of this study was to determine whether item difficulty is significantly affected by language difficulty and response set convergence. Language difficulty was varied by increasing sentence (stem) length, increasing syntactic complexity, and substituting uncommon words for more familiar terms in the item stem. Item wording ranged from…

The first of several planned volumes of Free Response Test Items contains geology questions developed by the Assessment and Evaluation Unit of the New South Wales Department of Education. Two additional geology volumes and biology and chemistry volumes are in preparation. The questions in this volume were written and reviewed by practicing…

One of the major assumptions of latent trait theory is that the items in a test measure a single dimension. This report describes an investigation of procedures for forming a set of items that meet this assumption. Factor analysis, nonmetric multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis and latent trait analysis were applied to simulated and real…

A specially designed answer format was used for three tests in a college level agriculture class of 19 students to record responses to three things about each item: (1) the student's choice of the best answer; (2) the degree of certainty with which the answer was chosen; and (3) all the answer choices which the student was certain were incorrect.…

Presents guidelines for constructing tests which accurately measure a student's cognitive skills and performance in a particular course. The advantages and disadvantages of two types of test items are listed (selected response and constructed response items). Both poor and good examples are given and general rules for test item writing are…

This article reviews recent investigations into intentionality (use of motive information) in young children's moral judgments. Intentionality has been shown to vary as a function of the vignette used to measure it. The educational implications of Piagetian theory and cognitive social learning theory for moral development are discussed.…

A broad-range tailored test of verbal ability, appropriate at any level from fifth grade upwards, is briefly described. The test score places persons at all levels directly on the same score scale. (Author/RC)

It is important to estimate the number of examinees who reached a test item, because item difficulty is defined by the number who answered correctly divided by the number who reached the item. A new method is presented and compared to the previously used definition of three categories of response to an item: (1) answered; (2) omitted--a…

This study investigated the relationships among the symbolic representation of problems given to students to solve, the mental representations they use to solve the problems, and the accuracy of their solutions. Twenty eleventh-grade science students were asked to think aloud as they solved problems on the ideal gas laws. The problems were…

The analysis of fit of data to a measurement model for graded responses is described. The model is an extension of Rasch's dichotomous model to formats which provide more than two levels of response to items. The model contains one parameter for each person and one parameter for each "step" in an item. A dichotomously-scored item…

The TESTFACT computer program and full-information factor analysis of test items were used in a computer simulation conducted to correct for the guessing effect. Full-information factor analysis also corrects for omitted items. The present version of TESTFACT handles up to five factors and 150 items. A preliminary smoothing of the tetrachoric…

One way to minimize the test taking advantage that test-wise students have is to offer all students the opportunity to become test-wise through formal instruction in test taking. This paper describes the development and use of "Form Z," a test that can be used as a teaching aid or as a research instrument for test wiseness. The test was designed…

Literature on the development of classroom achievement tests for high school and college level hearing impaired students is reviewed, with emphasis on achievement tests designed to ascertain whether a particular unit of instruction has been understood as it was presented. The paper reviews: the syntactical structure and vocabulary of test items;…

An attempt was made to examine authoritarian and non-authoritarian scales of social attitudes and their reversals as a function of: (1) content consistency; (2) acquiescence; and (3) a tendency to use extreme categories of response. The study questioned whether Adorno's fascism (F), dogmatism (D), ethnocentrism (E), and anti-Semitism (A-S) scales…

Three rating scales--with all positive or all negative wording, or a mixture of both--were administered to 522 children in grades four through six. The results indicated that it was difficult for students to indicate agreement by disagreeing with a negative statement. This affected test validity. Author/GDC)