No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

To date, the major emphasis in test and item evaluation has been directed toward statistical post-measures which rely heavily on data gathered from the administration of the instrument. These primarily summative techniques are limited, however, in that they are incapable of providing information about and item/test before it has been sent for field trials. This research presents a new direction in test and item analysis which, using test/item writing heuristics, provides a previously unavailable technology for instrument pre-analysis. The new field of "qualitative item and test pre-analysis" is proposed and described. The implications to the field are discussed in addition to specific suggestions for the use of this new technology. The design and creation of a base-case item and test pre-analysis expert system (ITAX) is also detailed, including the heuristics incorporated, implementation methodologies and limitations. The heuristics incorporated into the system include the detection of: two varieties of grammatical cues, negation/multiple negation, repetition of phrases within an options list, presence of too few options, inconsistent length of distractors, use of all- and none-of-the-above, repetition of significant words from the stem to the options, randomness of multiple choice answer placement, balance of true/false items and length of true/false items. A comprehensive reference to the system is also provided. / Master of Arts

Although formula scoring has been used since the early 1900s, it was not until 1975 that Frederic Lord offered the following potential psychometric justification for its use: If under formula-scoring directions an examinee omits only those items which would result in completely random guesses under number-right scoring directions, then the formula score will be a more efficient estimator of the examinee's standing on the trait measured. Whenever the number of omissions is greater than zero, the formula score will be more reliable than the number-right score. The purpose of this study was to test the premise that examinees omit only those items for which they have no knowledge when taking a test under formula-scoring directions. Several studies had been carried out previously to test this premise, and the design used in this study was a synthesis of the previous designs. Included in this study was an investigation of examinees' responses, under formula-scoring directions, to items that were constructed to be obscure. Also examinees responded to questions about their attitudes towards formula-scored tests and their strategies when taking formula-scored tests. Because of the results of the test of Lord's premise, also included in this study was a further investigation of omissiveness, the tendency to omit items under formula-scoring directions. Item difficulty and item omissions were examined relative to Lord's premise. A variable, called L for convenience, was computed for each item in order to find to what extent responses to test items support Lord's premise. Finally, the possibility of misinformation producing a counter effect to inappropriate omissions relative to Lord's premise was investigated. / Ph. D.

No description available.

The problem of this investigation was concerned with the relationship between computer-assisted practice testing and the achievement of freshmen students in introductory sociology in a community college. The purpose of the study was to examine the potential effect of an interactive computer-practice testing program upon the achievement of introductory sociology students in a community college.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education