Although methods for estimating item difficulty are abundant, little attention has been given to the psychological processes involved when a student responds to a single test item. Mastery of educational objectives is not proven when a student supplies the correct answer to items intended to test these objectives. The student's problem solving…

Matching test (MT) construction techniques were compared. These included: (a) MT instruction that limit the number of times responses can be selected to once, rather than more than once; (2) MTs that are organized in groups of five premises, or stems, rather than in groups of ten premises; and (3) MTs designed to measure knowledge, rather than a…

The Randominzed Response Technique was used with 83 undergraduate students in an Introductory Statistics course to: (1) demonstrate a means by which information of a sensitive nature can be obtained in a confidential manner; and (2) illustrate to a group of somewhat skeptical students an application of statistics to an interesting, real-world…

Three related experimental studies analyzed rate and accuracy of test response under time-limit and no-time-limit conditions. Test instructions and multiple-choice vocabulary items were administered by computer. Student volunteers received monetary rewards under both testing conditions. In the first study college students were blocked into high-…

Students were asked to make forecasts of fourteen quantities where true values would not become known for five or six months. The quantities were selected to be typical of the subjects which would be of interest to a decisionmaker in business or government, and included GNP, consumer prices, draft calls, deaths in South Vietnam, and election…

Repeated exposure to tests composed of memory items was compared to repeated exposure to tests including higher-level cognitive items and to tests composed of both item types. Other design factors were sex, ability level, subject matter sequence (science and social studies), and learning session. (A sample of 2008 eleventh-grade students…

The negative results to an assessment of a Bank Street-sponsored Follow Through program raised questions about conventional ways of assessing the effects of educational programs. Children in a Follow Through program using the developmental-interaction approach and children in conventional classrooms were observed and tested for comparison. The…

An attempt was made to develop and validate a Piagetian-based written test with successful use of the logic of specific Piagetian tasks defined as the criterion. Ninety-six randomly selected nine to sixteen year olds, stratified by age, were individually presented the Piagetian tasks of pendulum, balance, and combinations, and group administered a…

This study was designed to investigate the relationship between wait-time and two classroom interaction variables: cognitive level of teacher questions and length of student response. The interval of time between a teacher question and the next verbal response by teacher or student (wait-time) was measured using an electrocardiograph with…

INTERTAIL, the computer program which implements an approach to tailored testing outlined by Cliff (1975), was examined with errorless data in several Monte Carlo studies. Three replications of each cell of a 3 x 3 table with 10, 20 and 40 items and persons were analyzed. Mean rank correlation coefficients between the true order, specified by…

This paper examines the individual consistency of eleventh grade respondents in normal test-retest situations as well as situations involving changed response methods. It postulates the personality-trait "discriminator" (high vs low) and confirms the trait's influence on individual consistency within and across Biology Cognitive…

Binary, probability, and ordinal scoring procedures for multiple-choice items were examined. In two situations, it was found that both the probability and ordinal scoring systems were more reliable than the binary scoring method. (Author/CTM)

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)

A Likert seven-choice response format for personality inventories allows finer distinctions by subjects than the traditional two-choice format. The Eysenck Personality Inventory was employed in the present study to test the hypothesis that use of the expanded format would result in a clearer and more accurate indication of test structure.…

Students scoring in the upper and lower distributions of the Test Anxiety Scale solved anagrams under high stress (evaluative) and low stress (nonevaluative) conditions. The high-anxiety-stress group reported greater anxiety; rated themselves, their abilities, and the task more negatively; solved fewer anagrams; and estimated spending less time on…