The Validity of Taxonomic Classifications Used by a National Item Pool

Abstract

The success of examiners in classifying test items in terms of the levels of a taxonomy of educational skills and curriculum core categories in a national item pool is examined by comparing examiner's classifications with item difiiculty.The relation between taxonomy level and difficulty was found to be greater than for core categories but in neither case was it very marked. The implications of this finding are discussed.(1) COMPUTERS AND ITEM BANKS Computers were so named because the only significant work given the early models was computation. However, computers can be used for many other purposes, in particular for information retrieval and processing, beiig used in the same way as a person consults a library, a filing system, a directory or a dictionary.One such use in the area of test construction is the storage and retrieval of actual test questions and associated information, known as ' item banking '.Currently computer based systems are being developed which completely replace the routine work involved in exanlining, and only require examiners to decide what skills and content are to be tested and to appraise the final results. The system selects items to fulfil the examiner's requirements, arranges them in a desired order, and prints the test. Once students have taken the test, the system reads and scores the answer sheets, and a computed analysis is provided for the examiner by which he can evaluate the test as a whole, and in terms of individual items. Diagnostic teaching information is also supplied and the bank items and statistics updated.Item banks used by several institutions offer a number of advantages. By using a bank's facilities, an individual examiner generally has to contribute only a small fraction of items he would normally have to write if he were coristructing a test on his own. Other items are contributed by examiners in other institutions and items contributed in previous years are re-used.Under these conditions, an examiner can contribute his best items and the fact that the items will be on 'professional view' and

The development of a computer assisted instruction and assessment system in pharmacology

“…Table 4 lists the number of items in all categories for this classification. It was interesting that one other worker (Dunstan, 1973) has found it was probably adequate to classify items within an item bank on difficulty alone since higher taxonomic items would be more difficult. A feature which was suggested at this stage was to enable recall of the previous question after the result had been presented.…”