How to Construct Achievement Tests to Assess Comprehension

The thesis of this paper is that educational research workers have not yet learned how to develop achievement tests that meet the primitive first requirement for a system of measurement, namely that there is a clear and consistent definition of the things being counted. By "achievement test" I mean a set of questions asked to ascertain what a person has learned from exposure to instruction. There will be in the following a tacit restriction to paper-and-pencil test questions expressed in a natural language, though much of the discussion can be interpreted more broadly. The purpose of this paper is to propose the distinctions necessary to determine whether a person has comprehended an instructional communication, to outline procedures for constructing test questions based on these distinctions, and to show that test questions derived according to the procedures give rise to orderly, sensible data. The starting point for the analysis will be the now-classic Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Bloom, et al, 1956), and I shall rely on the important recent work of Bormuth (1970) and Hively (1970). Finally, a number of articles in the recent literature will be reviewed to determine how investigators currently construct tests and what they report about these tests.

[1]  L. T. Frase,et al.  Learning from prose material: length of passage, knowledge of results, and position of questions. , 1967, Journal of educational psychology.

[2]  H. E. Jones.  Experimental studies of college teaching : the effect of examination on permanence of learning , 2022 .

[3]  M. Ross Quillian,et al.  Retrieval time from semantic memory , 1969 .

[4]  Joanna P. Williams.  Comparison of several response modes in a review program. , 1963 .

[5]  A. J. Hull,et al.  INFORMATION, ACOUSTIC CONFUSION AND MEMORY SPAN. , 1964, British journal of psychology.

[6]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  वाक्यविन्यास का सैद्धान्तिक पक्ष = Aspects of the theory of syntax , 1965 .

[7]  Richard C. Anderson,et al.  Programmed introduction to psychology versus text-book style summary of the same lesson , 1968 .

[8]  A. D. BADDELEY,et al.  Semantic and Acoustic Similarity in Short-term Memory , 1964, Nature.

[9]  J. A. Adams,et al.  A closed-loop theory of paired-associate verbal learning. , 1970, Psychological review.

[10]  Pub Date,et al.  "The Comparative Field Experiment: An Illustration from High school Biology" , 1968 .

[11]  D R Olson,et al.  Language and thought: aspects of a cognitive theory of semantics. , 1970, Psychological review.

[12]  A. Baddeley,et al.  The effect of semantic similarity on retroactive interference in long- and short-term memory , 1966 .

[13]  Benton J. Underwood,et al.  Developmental Changes in Memory Attributes. , 1970 .

[14]  Richard C. Atkinson,et al.  Human Memory: A Proposed System and its Control Processes , 1968, Psychology of Learning and Motivation.

[15]  Robert Glaser,et al.  Instructional technology and the measurement of learing outcomes: Some questions. , 1963 .

[16]  H. F. Spitzer.  Studies in retention. , 1939 .

[17]  Richard C. Anderson.  Learning Principles From Text. , 1973 .

[18]  John B. Carroll,et al.  Words, Meanings and Concepts , 1964 .

[19]  R. Conrad.  An Association between Memory Errors and Errors due to Acoustic Masking of Speech , 1962, Nature.

[20]  Richard C. Anderson,et al.  Retroactive inhibition of meaningful discourse. , 1971 .

[21]  Donald M. Johnson,et al.  Evaluation of five methods of teaching concepts. , 1966 .

[22]  John R. Bormuth,et al.  On the theory of achievement test items , 1970 .

[23]  Wayne A. Wickelgren,et al.  Acoustic similarity and retroactive interference in short-term memory , 1965 .

[24]  J P WILLIAMS,et al.  EFFECTIVENESS OF CONSTRUCTED-RESPONSE AND MULTIPLE-CHOICE PROGRAMING MODES AS A FUNCTION OF TEST MODE. , 1965, Journal of educational psychology.

[25]  Darryl Bruce,et al.  Acoustic similarity effects on retrieval from secondary memory , 1970 .

[26]  H. Tiedeman.  A Study in Retention of Classroom Learning , 1948 .

[27]  B. Bloom.  Taxonomy of educational objectives , 1956 .

[28]  Richard C. Anderson.  Control of Student Mediating Processes During Verbal Learning and Instruction1 , 1970 .

[29]  Richard C. Anderson,et al.  Imagery and sentence learning. , 1971 .

[30]  D. J. Murray.  The role of speech responses in short-term memory. , 1967, Canadian journal of psychology.

[31]  L. T. Frase.  Some Data Concerning the Mathemagenic Hypothesis , 1968 .

[32]  R. Bruning,et al.  Effects of review and testlike events within the learning of prose materials. , 1968, Journal of educational psychology.

[33]  A. Paivio.  Mental imagery in associative learning and memory , 1969 .

[34]  John R. Bormuth,et al.  Children's comprehension of between- and within-sentence syntactic structures. , 1970, Journal of educational psychology.

[35]  E. Rothkopf,et al.  Selective facilitative effects of interspersed questions on learning from written materials. , 1967, Journal of educational psychology.

[36]  D. Meyer.  On the representation and retrieval of stored semantic information , 1970 .

[37]  A. Baddeley.  The Influence of Acoustic and Semantic Similarity on Long-term Memory for Word Sequences , 1966, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[38]  Richard C. Anderson,et al.  Effects of three types of inserted questions on learning from prose. , 1971 .

[39]  D. L. Hintzman.  Articulatory coding in short-term memory , 1967 .

[40]  Richard C. Anderson.  Encoding processes in the storage and retrieval of sentences , 1971 .

[41]  Murray Dj.  The role of speech responses in short-term memory. , 1967 .

[42]  A. Paivio,et al.  Mediation instructions and word attributes in paired-associate learning , 1967 .

[43]  Samuel A. Bobrow.  Memory for Words in Sentences. , 1970 .