This report describes the processes undertaken to revise the IDEA Student Ratings of Instruction (SRI) system. The previous revision occurred in 1999, as described in IDEA Technical Report No. 11, "Revising the IDEA System for Obtaining Student Ratings of Instructors and Courses" (Hoyt, Chen, Pallett, & Gross, 1999). The procedures…

Recent reform efforts in undergraduate biology have recommended transforming course exams to test at more cognitively challenging levels, which may mean including more cognitively challenging and more constructed-response questions on assessments. However, changing the characteristics of exams could result in bias against historically underserved…

Assessment in health sciences education has become an extremely critical issue in recent years, given the rapidly changing disease patterns and behavioral changes in communities among diverse cultural and economic contexts of patients. Globally, there is increasing demand for highly qualified contemporary healthcare professionals. Subsequently,…

This report describes statistical analyses performed on data collected in the Spring of 2015 from the pilot study of proposed revised and new items in the IDEA Student Ratings of Instruction (SRI) system. Described are the methods employed, results obtained, and decisions made in selecting items for the updated instruments. The procedures occurred…

Objective: The goal of this study was to evaluate a recent medical school curriculum change at our institution 3 years ago; specifically: shortening the Psychiatry core clerkship from 4 to 3 weeks and adding an optional 6-week core/elective combination rotation in lieu of the 3-week core. The authors aimed to determine whether clerkship length was…

In determining how reliable is reliable enough and how much error can be tolerated in criterion-referenced testing, the following relationships hold: (1) the more specific an objective is, the fewer the items required to reliably measure it; (2) the more specific the objectives are, the more objectives required to cover a given span of the…

This chapter should not only acquaint the reader with the present state of the art on Criterion-Referenced (CR) measurement but also suggest possible directions for further inquiry. The goal of the first part of this chapter is to deal with the definitional dilemma of CR measurement by proceeding from the more traditional view of CR measurement to…

Materials intended for driving knowledge test development use by operational licensing and education agencies were prepared. Candidate test items were developed, using literature and operational practice sources, to reflect current state-of-knowledge with respect to principles of safe, efficient driving, to legal regulations, and to traffic…

A good criterion-referenced test item is defined as the one which allows the individual to answer correctly if he masters the criterion behavior represented by the item and answer incorrectly if he actually does not master it. Therefore, a good discriminating item for criterion-referenced tests is the one which has a larger proportion of correct…

The Behavioral Objectives Writing Skills Test (BOWST) was designed to provide an estimate of the elementary teacher's ability to write behavioral objectives. This instrument, which requires the teacher to develop three behavioral objectives for each of four hypothetical classroom settings, has wide utility as a teacher-training tool. It may be…

Factor analysis was used to summarize the interrelationships between a large and varied collection of measures. Data for 500 third grade students assigned to either an experimental or a comparison condition were obtained. The data covered scores for the first 28 items of the Student Affective Behavior Checklist, (2) 9 nonmathematics subtests of…

Discusses multiple choice questions and presents a statistical approach to post-test correction for guessing that can be used in spreadsheets to automate the correction and generate a grade. Topics include the relationship between the learning objectives and multiple-choice assessments; and guessing correction by negative marking. (LRW)

This study investigated the effect of providing students with the objectives of a lesson before the lesson delivery on their achievement at the end of the lesson. Two hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. The quasi-experimental pretest-posttest-control group design was used, with a total of 4 groups. All four groups were taught the same…

Focusing on the measurement of outcomes rather than on module materials specifically, test items were constructed to evaluate the Career Education Modules for grades 7-12 developed by the Missouri Career Education Project. First, the stated learning objectives of the modules were converted into outcome objectives. Next, the relevant vocabulary,…

Developing a student testing mathematical model for instructional management purposes necessitates clear structuring of the curriculum materials involved, whether designated in the domain of content or the dimension of concepts or skills. Such structuring of a course written in performance objectives is presented and noted to be helpful in making…