The appropriateness of using time limits when measuring students' competence is questionable. This study assessed whether students who had failed the College Level Academic Skills Test (CLAST) could improve their performance if they were allowed additional time on retaking the test. Subjects were 641 students who took the CLAST from fall 1982…

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…

Social desirability responding and effort justification were each studied for their effect on response shift as seen in retrospective pretest-posttest responses. The first study used a bogus pipeline induction (half the subjects were told their self-reporting could later be validated) before the self-report pretest. After experimental or control…

The sensitivity of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking with regard to an experimenter-induced response set was investigated. One hundred and ninety-eight subjects were divided into four groups. Before performing the Unusual Uses Activity (Verbal Form A), each group was given a unique set of instructions. Group I received standard instructions…

Traditionally, matching test formats have been avoided in favor of multiple-choice items for several reasons, including item analysis properties and chance performance characteristics. In the light of research on test format and anxiety, this study postulates that, if a matching test could assess knowledge for a given topic as effectively as an…

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…

The correlation between risk taking behavior and test results on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) was examined in a group of 47 fourth and fifth grade students identified for a gifted and talented program. The risk-taking check list (DEEP) was developed by the Downington, Pennsylvania Area School District, and includes four…

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…

Judgments that favorably set an individual apart from others tend to be made more rapidly, suggesting that the self-concept is both an effective and a cognitive entity. Subjects rated the self-applicability of traits on a 100-point scale. As in other studies using dichotomous judgements, judgement speed increased with increasing self-applicability…

Patterns of cautiousness in a prose learning task were examined in three age groups of adults representing three levels of educational experience. Types of instruction, order of material presentation, sex, and educational experience level were varied for all groups of the 90 adults participating in the study. The main findings were as follows: (1)…

The Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) was administered to over 200 third graders to investigate the effects of using consumable test booklets versus non-consumable booklets which require a separate answer sheet. It was hypothesized that there would be no significant differences in CTBS scores between students using consumable booklets and…

Questions are raised about the time within a test administration period that may be available for review for those candidates who have time enough, or more than enough, to finish. The assumption is proposed that rate of work may be normally distributed. The rate of work for those who have finished a test cannot be determined from their answer…

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.…

The question of whether test factor structure is indicative of the test item hierarchy was examined. Data from 1,000 subjects on two sets of five bivalued Law School Admission Test items, which were analyzed with latent trait methods of Bock and Lieberman and of Christoffersson in Psychometrika, were analyzed with an ordering-theoretic method to…

This report describes an automated system for administering, scoring, and recording results of multiple-choice tests. The system consists of examinee station, proctor station, and central computer; the report describes the equipment and the programing characteristics of the respective components. The system is designed for tests tailored to the…