A Handbook of Test Construction (Psychology Revivals) : Introduction to Psychometric Design

Psychological tests provide reliable and objective standards by which individuals can be evaluated in education and employment. Therefore accurate judgements must depend on the reliability and quality of the tests themselves. Originally published in 1986, this handbook by an internationally acknowledged expert provided an introductory and comprehensive treatment of the business of constructing good tests. Paul Kline shows how to construct a test and then to check that it is working well. Covering most kinds of tests, including computer presented tests of the time, Rasch scaling and tailored testing, this title offers: a clear introduction to this complex field; a glossary of specialist terms; an explanation of the objective of reliability; step-by-step guidance through the statistical procedures; a description of the techniques used in constructing and standardizing tests; guidelines with examples for writing the test items; computer programs for many of the techniques. Although the computer testing will inevitably have moved on, students on courses in occupational, educational and clinical psychology, as well as in psychological testing itself, would still find this a valuable source of information, guidance and clear explanation. Cover 1 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Original Title Page 6 Original Copyright Page 7 Table of Contents 8 Preface 10 Glossary of terms 12 1 The characteristics of good tests in psychology 16 Types of scale 16 Reliability 17 Validity 19 Discriminatory power 23 Classical theory of error in measurement 23 Standardization and norms 32 Some other models of test responses 32 Conclusions and summary 38 2 Making tests reliable I: Intelligence and ability tests. Item writing 39 Instructions 40 Items for intelligence tests 40 Tests of ability and attainment 49 Conclusions 71 3 Making tests reliable II: Personality inventories. Item writing 73 Problems in constructing personality inventories 73 Writing items for personality inventories 75 Eliminating response sets 81 Item content 89 Conclusions 90 4 Making tests reliable III: Constructing other types of test 92 Objective tests 92 Projective tests 113 The construction of other motivational tests 122 Mood and state scales 123 Attitude measurement 126 Summary and conclusions 131 5 Computing test-reliability 133 Importance of internal-consistency reliability in test construction 133 Sources of unreliability 136 Sampling subjects in the study of reliability 137 Computing reliability 139 Conclusions 146 6 ítem trials 148 Problems with the item-analytic method 148 Items 149 Important sampling variables 149 Item analysis: two useful indices 152 The procedures of item analysis 154 Selection of items after item analysis 157 Failure to form a test 161 7 Computing the discriminatory power and the validity of tests 165 Discriminatory power 165 Validity 167 8 Standardizing the test 174 Sampling 174 The norms 179 The content criterion 185 9 Other methods of test construction 190 Criterion-keyed tests 190 Factor-analytic tests 194 Conclusions 207 10 Computerized testing, tailored testing, Rasch scaling and cognitive process studies 208 Computerized testing 208 Tailored testing 210 Rasch scaling 212 Cognitive-processing approach to human abilities 216 11 Summary and conclusions 221 Appendix 1: Item-analysis programs 223 Appendix 2: Using the programs 256 Bibliography 261 Name index 271 Subject index 273