Is. REPORT SECURITY CLASSiFICATION 1b. RESTRICTIVE MARKINGSl Unclassified ___________________________ 2.. SECURITY CLASSIIFICATION AUTKORITY 3. OISTIBUTIONIAVAaIASUTY OF REPORT 2. DICAICAIONOOWNGRAENG SCHEDULE Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. 4. PERPORMIING ORGANIZATION REPORT NUMBERS) S. MONITORING ORGANIZATION REPORT NUM&6R(S) SUMMY This paper describes the provisional equating of Form P 1 and P 2 of the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test (AFOQT) and the associated analyses in preparation for its operational implementation in 1987. The pre-imlemntation equating was necessary (a) to check the adequacy of the items in the new forms, (b) to assess the similarity of the new forms, and (c) to establish conversion tables for placing scores from the new test on the mtric of Form 0. Three forms of the AFOQT (0, P 1 , and P 2) ware adeinistered to about 3,400 military subjects at 11 Air Force bases. The subjects wre from Basic Military Training School (ONTS), Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps (AFROTC), and Officer Training School (OTS). Analyses ware computed at the item, subtest, and composite levels and several types of equatings ware completed. The distributions of items based on item difficulty and item discrimination were similar across forms, but not Identical. Equipercentile equatings were used to produce conversion tables for Forms P for provisional use prior to the Initial Operational Test and Evaluation (IOT&E) of the new forms. PREFACE The Air Force Human Resources Laboratory (AFHRL) is tasked as the test development agency for the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test (AFOOT) by Air Force Regulation 35-8, Air Force Military Personnel Testing System. The current research and development (R&D) effort was undertaken as part of AFHRL's responsibility to develop, revise, and conduct research in support of the AFOQT. Work was accomplished under Task 771918, Selection and Classification Technologies, which is part of a larger effort In Force Acquisition and Distribution Systems. The study was completed under Work Units 77191847 (Development and Validation of Civilian and Nonrated Officer Selection Methodologies) and 77191824 (Officer Item Pool Development).
Performance in complex tasks may not be a monotonic function of experience. In several domains, an inverted U-shaped function has been observed, with increased error rates being associated with intermediate levels of experience. This contradicts the idea of a linear relationship between the development of expertise and performance levels. A simple monotonic increase in similarity to some ideal knowledge representation may not adequately describe changes in knowledge over time. Crosssectional research on people with varying levels of expertise at complex tasks supports the idea of distinct stages in the development of expertise and helps account for an increase in errors as people develop new skills.We conducted a longitudinal study of ninth-grade biology students' understanding of certain ecology concepts. Students' mental representations of these concepts were measured three times during a 12-week course. Over the semester, similarity to the knowledge representation of a good student was more predictive of final grades than was similarity to the teachers' expert representation, as was predicted. According to the non-monotonic theory of knowledge development, expert representations are less powerful predictors of student performance because they do not adequately model student knowledge of the domain. These data support the non-monotonic theory of knowledge development by revealing the superiority of the good student representation over the teacher representation.
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