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Development and Validation of a Waiver Test For the Math Content Courses Required of Elementary Education Majors at Utah State University

Purpose and Procedures
The purpose of this paper was to construct and validate an instrument which could effectively identify students enrolled in the elementary teacher training program a t Utah State University whose mathematical competency equals or exceeds the standard for completion of the required math content courses prior to taking those courses. It was the hope of the writer that such students would be allowed to waive those courses and substitute courses representing areas of greater need for the individual student.
Care was taken in the construction and validation of the instrument to assure content validity with college-level texts designed for such courses and elementary texts which the teacher is expected to use in the teaching situation.
Preliminary forms of the instrument constructed in the study were administered to pilot groups. An item analysis was performed to determine the level of difficulty and discriminating power of individual test items as well as the ability of the distractors to distract. The final form consisted of 58 multiple-choice test items.
Results
Using Kuder-Richardson reliability formula number 20, the reliability coefficient of the instrument was .87, which indicates a high level of reliability for a screening test. The variance was 82.72, resulting in a standard deviation of 9.10.
Correlating the test results, when used as a pretest in the above-mentioned courses, with final grades in the course resulted in a correlation coefficient which was significant at the .01 level of significance, indicating high predictive validity of the instrument with actual success int he course.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UTAHS/oai:digitalcommons.usu.edu:etd-4135
Date01 May 1975
CreatorsTolman, Marvin Nelson
PublisherDigitalCommons@USU
Source SetsUtah State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceAll Graduate Theses and Dissertations
RightsCopyright for this work is held by the author. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. For more information contact Andrew Wesolek (andrew.wesolek@usu.edu).

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