A history teacher, Mrs. Scroggins, tries to determine the consistency of her tests by
occasionally re-administering them to her students, then seeing how much similarity
there was in the way her students performed. What kind of reliability evidence is Mrs.
Scroggins attempting to collect?
A. Test-retest
B. Alternate form
C. Internal consistency
D. Precision
Of the following four statements, one is not a guideline to be followed when
constructing multiple-choice items. Which statement is it?
A. Randomly assign correct answers to the available answer-choice positions.
B. To keep stems brief, place most words in an item’s alternatives.
C. Don”t let the length of alternatives suggest correct or incorrect answers.
D. Never use “all of the above” as a response option.
Classroom teachers are most apt to focus on which of the following?
A. Evidence of alternate-form reliability
B. Internal structure evidence of validity
C. Evidence of internal-consistency reliability
D. Test content evidence of validity
Which one of the following statements regarding the improvement of classroom
assessments is not accurate?
A. Classroom teachers can employ judgmental improvement procedures, empirical
procedures, or both.
B. For selected-response tests, especially multiple-choice items, distractor analyses can
prove useful in item-improvement.
C. Performance-based approaches to item improvement usually are different for tests
aimed at criterion-referenced inferences than for those aimed at norm-referenced
inferences.
D. Students’ reactions to test items should play little or no role in item improvement.
Which of the following is a generally recommended item-writing rule for matching
items?
A. Whenever possible, employ heterogeneous lists of premises and responses.
B. Typically, employ more premises than responses, allowing each response to be used
more than once.
C. Employ relatively long lists, usually containing at least two-dozen premises or
responses.
D. In the test’s directions, describe the basis for matching and the number of times a
response can be used.
Which of the following is not a reason that should dissuade policymakers from
evaluating educational quality on the basis of students’ scores on certain educational
achievement tests?
A. There are often substantial mismatches between the content covered on some of
these tests and local curricular emphases.
B. Substantial gaps between minority and majority students’ performance on most
accountability tests will rarely be found.
C. There is a technical tendency to remove from such tests items covering important,
teacher-stressed knowledge and skills.
D. It is difficult to tell from such tests how much of a student’s test performance is due
to what was taught in school rather than to students’ socioeconomic status or inherited
academic aptitudes.
When students’ test scores areas predictedcorrelated positively with those students’
scores on a test aimed at a similar measurement mission, of what is this an example?
A. Construct-irrelevant variance
B. Divergent validity evidence
C. Convergent validity evidence
D. Construct underrepresentation
One of the important rules to be followed in creating multiple binary-choice items is
that:
A. Most items should mesh sensibly with a cluster’s stimulus material.
B. Item clusters should be strikingly separated from one another.
C. The stimulus material for any cluster of items should contain a substantial amount of
extraneous information.
D. Multiple binary-choice items, to avoid confusion, should never be included in a test
already containing binary-choice items.
Which of the following steps is not one that should be followed in the creation of a
multifocus affective inventory for use in classroom assessment?
A. Select the affective variables to measure.
B. Decide on how many items to use in measuring each variable.
C. Create a series of exclusively positive statements related to each affective variable
selected.
D. Determine the number and phrasing of students’ response options.
Which of the following is the most useful indicator of the consistency of an individual
student’s test performance?
A. A polytomous item-analysis
B. A dichotomous item-analysis
C. A standard error of measurement
D. An alternate-form reliability coefficient
Which of the following is not a key step that a classroom teacher needs to take in
implementing a portfolio assessment program?
A. Decide on the kinds of work samples to collect.
B. Decide which students should be involved in the portfolio assessment program.
C. Require students to evaluate continually their own portfolio products.
D. Schedule and conduct a meaningful number of portfolio conferences.
Which of the following would be the most suitable assessment target for a multifocus
affective inventory?
A. Students’ ability to write a persuasive essay
B. Students’ interests in different subjects
C. Students’ skill in solving complex geometric problems
D. Students’ abilities to perform routine physical skills such as ball-tossing and
ball-catching
Which of the following indices is most commonly used to represent an item’s difficulty?
A. p value
B. Correlation coefficient
C. Discrimination index
D. Distractor efficiency
Consider the following set of factors that could be employed to judge the quality of the
tasks for performance tests. Which one is not generally endorsed as a task-selection
factor?
A. Motivational impact on students
B. Authenticity
C. Teachability of the skill assessed by a task
D. Feasibility of implementation
Which of the following is a recommended item-writing rule for the construction of
binary-choice items?
A. Include no more than two concepts in any one statement.
B. Employ a roughly equal number of statements representing the two categories being
tested.
C. If one category being assessed requires longer statements than the other category, be
sure that the disparity in statement-length is constant.
D. Employ relatively few double-negative statements and, if you do, be sure to
emphasize with italics or bold-face type that a negative is involved.
Which of the following statements about goal-attainment grading is most defensible?
A. “Because students’ effort plays such a pivotal role in a student’s ultimate learning, all
goal-attainment grading must include a provision for incorporating students’ levels of
effort.”
B. “Given its focus on students’ mastery of curricular-targets, goal-attainment grading
essentially precludes the possibility of teachers’ measuring students’ affective
dispositions.”
C. “Because of the centrality of curricular aims in any goal-attainment conception of
grading, the curricular targets being sought should be carefully described to students’
parents and to students themselves at grading time.”
D. “If a teacher can collect defensible assessment evidence of a student’s mastery of the
teacher’s designated curricular aims, then this evidence should be the only basis for
goal-attainment grading.”
Which of the following is not a traditional reason that teachers assess students?
A. To monitor students’ progress
B. To assign grades to students
C. To clarify instructional intentions
D. To determine instructional effectiveness
Which of the following views regarding the assessment of English language learners
(ELL) is most defensible?
A. ELL students, if tested with regular English-language tests, will often outperform
students whose native language is English.
B. The use of assessment accommodations for ELL students typically leads to more
valid test-based inferences about those students.
C. It is relatively easy to develop alternate tests for ELL students in those students’
native languages.
D. Almost all groups charged with the assessment of ELL students urge the use either of
translated tests or, failing that, the provision of interpreters for ELL students.
Which of the following conclusions regarding multiple binary-choice items has not
been supported by available research?
A. These items are highly efficient in gathering student achievement data.
B. These items are a bit less difficult for students than multiple-choice items.
C. These items tend to be more reliable than other forms of selected-response items.
D. These items are regarded by students as more difficult than multiple-choice items.
Which of the following, from a classroom teacher’s perspective, is probably the most
serious drawback of portfolio assessment?
A. Parents’ negative reactions to portfolio assessment
B. Students’ negative reactions to portfolio assessment
C. Portfolio assessment’s time-demands on teachers
D. The excessive attention given to portfolio assessment by educational policymakers
Which of the following assertions most accurately captures the relationship between
disparate impact of a test and assessment bias?
A. If a test has a disparate impact on different student subgroups, the test is a priori
biased.
B. If a test is biased, it will only rarely have a disparate impact on different student
subgroups.
C. A test that is biased against either gender group will almost certainly be biased
against ethnic groups.
D. If a test has a disparate impact on different student subgroups, the test is not
necessarily biased.
Which of the following questions is not an element in a research-supported conception
of formative assessment?
A. Formative assessment is a process, not a test.
B. Formative assessment calls for the use of assessment-elicited evidence in making
adjustment decisions.
C. Formative assessment should be used only by teachers to adjust their ongoing
instructional activities.
D. Formative assessment must be carefully planned.
Many experienced assessors of student affect suggest the most appropriate way for
classroom teachers to monitor their students’ affect is through the use of:
A. Anonymously completed self-report inventories
B. Anonymously completed personalized essays
C. Teacher observations of affect-related student behaviors
D. Affectively oriented performance tests
Which one of the following statements could be technically correct?
A. “The test-based inference is valid.”
B. “The test is definitely valid.”
C. “The test is face-valid.”
D. “The test is consequentially valid.”
Which of the following assertions is most accurate?
A. Criterion-referenced score-based inferences are relative interpretations.
B. Norm-referenced score-based inferences are absolute interpretations.
C. Norm-referenced score-based inferences and criterion-referenced score-based
inferences are not essentially interchangeable.
D. Norm-referenced score-based inferences are typically more useful to classroom
teachers than criterion-referenced score-based inferences.
Which of the following statements is most accurate?
A. A test built to provide norm-referenced inferences about students is likely to yield
accurate criterion-referenced inferences about those students.
B. A test built to provide criterion-referenced inferences about students can sometimes
be used to make norm-referenced inferences about those students.
C. Norm-referenced inferences and criterion-referenced inferences about students are
essentially interchangeable.
D. Criterion-referenced tests and norm-referenced tests, that is, the assessment
instruments themselves, are not fundamentally different.
Which of the following is not an important rule to be followed in the classroom
assessment of student affect?
A. Make all inferences about students’ affective status so the inferences are
group-focused rather than individual-focused.
B. If any self-report inventories are used, students’ responses must be truly anonymous.
C. Any affective variable being measured must be genuinely noncontroversial.
D. To monitor students’ ever-changing attitudes and interests, assess affect on at least a
bi-weekly basis.
Which of the following rules is not one that is recommended when creating a scoring
rubric that will have a positive impact on classroom instruction?
A. Make certain the skill to be assessed is truly significant.
B. Be sure that all of the rubric’s evaluative criteria can be addressed instructionally by
teachers.
C. Employ as many evaluative criteria as possible to judge major aspects of students’
responses.
D. Provide a terse label for each of the rubric’s evaluative criteria.
Which of the following should be most influential in guiding those who create
educational tests?
A. The Common Core State Standards
B. Test specifications of the PARCC Assessment Consortium
C. Test specifications of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium
D. The AERA-APA-NCME Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing
For tests intended to provide norm-referenced interpretations, which of the following
kinds of items should be sought?
A. Negative discriminators
B. Positive discriminators
C. Nondiscriminators
D. None of the above
During recent years, when results of NAEP tests are contrasted with results of state
accountability tests, which of the following statements best captures the relationship
between those two sets of results?
A. Students’ performances on NAEP and on state accountability tests are essentially
equivalent.
B. Students’ performances on a state’s tests are classified higher than those same
students’ scores on NAEP.
C. Students’ performances on NAEP are typically better than those same students’
scores on their state’s accountability tests.
D. Students in a state usually score better on NAEP than they do on their own state’s
mathematics tests, but less well on their state’s reading tests than they do on NAEP
reading tests.
What kind of instructional objective is Mrs. Jenkins pursuing when she wants her
students to become able to distinguish between facts and opinions presented in a
newspaper’s “Letters to the Editor”?
A. Cognitive
B. Affective
C. Psychomotor
D. None of the above
Which of the following is an instructionally beneficial rubric?
A. A task-specific rubric
B. A hypergeneral rubric
C. A skill-focused rubric
D. None of the above
Which of the following is a general item-writing rule that should be followed in the
writing of all items for classroom assessments?
A. To challenge students adequately, use vocabulary terms slightly more advanced than
required.
B. If possible, provide clues for students to come up with correct answers even if those
clues are not directly relevant to the knowledge and/or skill being assessed.
C. Because stronger students will usually be able to discern the nature of the assessment
tasks before them, directions about how students are to respond need not be specific or
detailed.
D. Attempt to employ syntax in test items that is well within the understanding levels of
the students being assessed.