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Developing and Validating Multiple-Choice Test Items
This book is intended for anyone who is seriously interested in designing and validating multiple-choice test items that measure understanding and the application of knowledge and skills to complex situations, such as critical thinking and problem solving. The most comprehensive and authoritative book in its field, this edition has been extensively revised to
*more information about writing items that match content standards;
*more information about creating item pools and item banking;
*a new set of item-writing rules (with examples) in chapter 5, as well as guidelines for other multiple-choice formats;
*hundreds of examples including an expanded chapter 4 devoted to exemplary item formats and a new chapter 6 containing exemplary items (with author annotations);
*a chapter on item generation (chapter 7) featuring item modeling and other procedures that speed up item development; and
*a more extensive set of references to past and current work in the area of multiple-choice item writing and validation.
This book will be of interest to anyone who develops test items for large-scale assessments, as well as teachers and graduate students who desire the most comprehensive and authoritative information on the design and validation of multiple-choice test items.
*more information about writing items that match content standards;
*more information about creating item pools and item banking;
*a new set of item-writing rules (with examples) in chapter 5, as well as guidelines for other multiple-choice formats;
*hundreds of examples including an expanded chapter 4 devoted to exemplary item formats and a new chapter 6 containing exemplary items (with author annotations);
*a chapter on item generation (chapter 7) featuring item modeling and other procedures that speed up item development; and
*a more extensive set of references to past and current work in the area of multiple-choice item writing and validation.
This book will be of interest to anyone who develops test items for large-scale assessments, as well as teachers and graduate students who desire the most comprehensive and authoritative information on the design and validation of multiple-choice test items.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
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July 24, 2009
Hey kids! Do you like writing multiple choice test items that exhibit desirable psychometric properties? You DO? Then Developing and Validating Multiple-Choice Test Items by Thomas Haladyna is for you!
Glibness aside, I actually did find this to be a pretty useful book and it'll be kept within easy reach as a reference book in my office. I picked it up because I was developing a high stakes, multiple-choice test for a work project and wanted to make sure I was doing things right and covering all the bases. I generated double fist fulls of these kinds of tests when I taught undergraduate classes at the University of Missouri, but apparently I and everyone else going all the way back to my grade school was doing it ALL WRONG. Or at best not as well as we could have been.
What I like about Developing and Validating Multiple-Choice Test Items is that it picks a focus and sticks with it. After some obligatory introductory philosophizing, the book walks you through the various multiple choice item formats (of which there are way more than I realized), then moved on to how to actually generate the items and how to check over them to make sure they're valid for whatever use you have in mind. The work is replete with practical "how to" kinds of advice in the forms of rules, check lists, and examples of good/bad items. Only occasionally does the author veer off into naval gazing and discussions that seemed a little pedantic to me, such as providing 3 answer choices to each question instead of 4. But most of those asides were self-contained and easy to skim, so it worked out fine.
This isn't to say that writing these kinds of items is easy. In fact once I sat down and actually started trying to churn them out I found that it's actually very HARD to do if you do it right. Creating believable but still objectively wrong answers to put in there with the right answer is actually the hardest part. But in the end, I was able to take what was in this work and with just a little additional research put together a training program for test item writers that I felt would give them (and me) the groundwork necessary to create a good test out of nothing.
Glibness aside, I actually did find this to be a pretty useful book and it'll be kept within easy reach as a reference book in my office. I picked it up because I was developing a high stakes, multiple-choice test for a work project and wanted to make sure I was doing things right and covering all the bases. I generated double fist fulls of these kinds of tests when I taught undergraduate classes at the University of Missouri, but apparently I and everyone else going all the way back to my grade school was doing it ALL WRONG. Or at best not as well as we could have been.
What I like about Developing and Validating Multiple-Choice Test Items is that it picks a focus and sticks with it. After some obligatory introductory philosophizing, the book walks you through the various multiple choice item formats (of which there are way more than I realized), then moved on to how to actually generate the items and how to check over them to make sure they're valid for whatever use you have in mind. The work is replete with practical "how to" kinds of advice in the forms of rules, check lists, and examples of good/bad items. Only occasionally does the author veer off into naval gazing and discussions that seemed a little pedantic to me, such as providing 3 answer choices to each question instead of 4. But most of those asides were self-contained and easy to skim, so it worked out fine.
This isn't to say that writing these kinds of items is easy. In fact once I sat down and actually started trying to churn them out I found that it's actually very HARD to do if you do it right. Creating believable but still objectively wrong answers to put in there with the right answer is actually the hardest part. But in the end, I was able to take what was in this work and with just a little additional research put together a training program for test item writers that I felt would give them (and me) the groundwork necessary to create a good test out of nothing.
Displaying 1 of 1 review