Several formats for testing English style are described and discussed. The questions are taken from eight versions of the Cologne placement test for beginning university students and a test battery designed for the German Academic Exchange Service. The first two formats are a multiple choice question and a paragraph with underlined words and…

The sample test items included in this document are intended as a resource for teachers of Marketing and Distributive Education programs with emphasis on hospitality and recreation marketing, and tourism and travel services marketing. The related curriculum material has been published in the Travel and Tourism syllabus, an advanced-level module in…

This presentation compares the results of a reanalysis of items in one form of a level of the 1978 SRA Achievement Series with the results from the pretest analysis. The bias analyses were performed on white or majority, black, Hispanic, male, and female samples from the pretest and two subsequent samples. Comparisons were made in terms of the…

One of the recurrent themes of the psychometric literature has been the idea that the incorrect responses a person makes to test items contain information that might be useful in determining the person's position on the variable the items are intended to define. The "Partial Credit" model, a member of the family of latent trait models…

Features of a probabilistic testing system that has been implemented on the "cerl" PLATO computer system are described. The key feature of the system is the manner in which an examinee responds to each test item; the examinee distributes probabilities among the alternatives of each item by positioning a small square on or within an…

A method of investigating for possible bias in test items is proposed that uses analysis of variance for item data based on groups that have been selected to have identical test score distributions. The item data used are arcsin transformations of item difficulties. The methodological procedure has the following advantages: (1) The arcsin…

Traditionally, comparable content-area forms and levels of a multi-level, multi-form achievement test series have been equated using the equipercentile method. There is some evidence to indicate, however, that better procedures are needed. A linking procedure is being used to equate simultaneously 40 different test forms of an achievement test:…

Attention is drawn to the dynamics of criterion-referenced test (CRT) construction in this report. How CRT's are developed at the Instructional Objectives Exchange is described through a series of three steps. The procedures pertain to the construction of "off the shelf" as well as "customized" tests. Step one, isolating the…

A proficient item writer should possess several attributes: knowledge and understanding of the material being tested, continuous awareness of objectives, continous awareness of the instructional model, understanding of the students for whom the items are intended, skill in written communication, and skill in the techniques of item writing. The…

Angoff's method for identifying possible biased test items was applied to four computer-generated hypothetical tests, two of which contained no biased items and two of which contained a few biased items. The tests were generated to match specifications of a latent trait model. Angoff's method compared item difficulty estimates for two different…

This pamphlet describes the exciting potential of item banking--a new approach to testing which combines both comparability of scores with flexibility of test format. Item banks are collections of items where the characteristics of each item is known and these characteristics can be summated to described a test made from such items. The principle…

This paper briefly discusses the use of item sampling for student evaluation in a summative evaluation context. Its proposition is that item sampling is a means of achieving better and broader student evaluation because it leaves room for individualized evaluation. Item sampling can be implemented properly by associating it to the concept of item…

Two studies were undertaken to demonstrate the usefulness of partitioning procedures for studying test items. Achievement test items in five content areas of educational measurement were used as stimuli to be sorted by groups of students with varying levels of sophistication with the content, with the hypothesis that sorting by classes with…

Results from 188 subjects indicate that most of the items on the test conform to a Rasch latent trait model, but tend to cluster into levels consistent with a hierarchical structure of skills. (AA)

Three algorithms for selecting a subset of originally available items, to maximize coefficient alpha, were compared on the size of the resulting alpha and computation time required with nine sets of data. The characteristics of a computer program to perform these item analyses are described. (Author/JKS)