Saturday, May 10, 2008

Student assessments by M/C testing and T/F

How many teachers do you know that after giving their class of student a multiple question true/false question test then take the test and correct it and do an item analysis? Is it one out of a 100 or one out of 1000. If a teacher never does an item analysis, how do they know that their question have and validity or reliability at all? Did you ever give any consideration to true and false question analysis? If you have taken a class in probability you know that if you flip a coin 100 times that it should read heads approximately 50 times out of a 100. So you can use the same thought process and realize that if less then 50% of the students get a question right, that their is some reason that they are choosing the incorrect answer. Is it a poorly wrote question?The way to check the reliability of a multiple choice question is a little more difficult. It is a statistic concept where you check how many of the top students choose a correct response compared to the lowest scoring students, choosing a correct or incorrect response and the correlation of the two. I will explain this in more detail in another Blog.