Fifty-eight undergraduate and graduate student volunteers participated in a factorial experiment designed to test hypotheses about the effects of two levels of information organization and four types of adjunct prequestion treatments on performance on specific amount items and two types of items organized in the same manner as the graphical…

Results of research conducted to ascertain the effect on test grades of changing answer choices are presented. The main questions that were examined were: (1) Does the changing of responses to test items (presumably based upon item reconsideration) result in better test scores?; (2) Is the amount of changes related to the score a person receives…

The general purpose of this study was to determine the effects of similarities between stems and keyed choices on test difficulty. Unlike previous investigations of this undesirable characteristic of some multiple-choice items, the present study employed items that were unintentionally faulty and samples of examinees who were highly experienced…

Providing examinees with advanced knowledge of the difficulty of an item led to an increase in test performance with no loss of reliability. This finding was consistent across several test formats. ( Author/JKS)

This paper reports an investigation of inferencing in Form Five of the Reading Comprehension component of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. The first step in the investigation consisted of an analysis of the language of the test to determine how the inferencing strategies employed might serve to mask answers. This preliminary analysis suggested that…