Principle 1: Define and clarify the content
Writing a good assessment item depends on deciding what is ”fair game.“ Drawing clear boundaries around the intended content ensures that items focus on the content of interest and prevents the introduction of content that is out of bounds.
Principle 2: Target the item
Targeting assessments items to one or two sub-ideas makes each item precise, enabling a specific and clear assessment of students’ understanding of a particular idea. Plus, the cognitive load of the item, or how much information a student needs to consider when answering the item, increases as an item assesses more ideas. There is an important place for items that ask students to make connections across several ideas. However, without precisely targeted items, it is difficult to know why students struggle with the more complex ones—do students lack understanding of one or more pieces of content, or are they having difficulty relating the various ideas?
Principle 3: Necessity
Students should have to know the target content to answer a question correctly. Put another way, students should not be able to answer the item correctly without knowing the content (for instance, through test-wiseness).
Principle 4: Sufficiency
Sufficiency means that the knowledge in the target content is all a student needs to know to answer the item correctly; answering the item correctly requires no knowledge outside the target content.
Principle 5: Don’t Teach
It is important to keep the entire assessment in mind to avoid one item teaching content that may be assessed in another. Providing some context can be important for situating the content of an item, but it is important to be careful that the context does not teach other ideas being assessed. (We don’t believe that students can learn science well from reading an assessment item, but the test-wise student will use clues in one item to answer another one.)
Principle 6: Mirroring
”Mirroring“ means that all answer choices should reflect the question asked. Mirroring helps students know what to expect from the answer choices and prevents them from ruling out certain choices simply because they do not answer the question asked.
Principle 7: Maximize comprehension
Assessment items should use language that is accessible to as many students in the class as possible. As much as possible, items should assess students’ knowledge and understanding of science content, not their reading ability.
Items should be analyzed on the basis of linguistic criteria that support student access to assessment items, especially for limited English Language Learners. Meeting these criteria will increase the validity of interpretations that can be made about student understanding for a wider range of students. Some of these guidelines are included here:
- Keep item sentences or stems brief and straightforward, with a simple sentence or phrase structure.
- Be consistent in paragraph structure.
- Use present tense and active voice as much as possible.
- Use pronouns judiciously.
- Omit words with double meanings or colloquialisms or define them in the text.[1]
Additional guidelines for the use of visuals in test items:
- Use visuals to facilitate the understanding of what is being asked or presented in an item or group of items.
- Visuals should mirror, or parallel, the item statements and expectations.
- No ”supplementary” or unnecessary information should be placed in the visual to distract students from the requirements in the item.
- Represent each major part of the item in the visual.
- Simple text can and should be used in the visuals that correspond to important words in the item. [1]
To learn more about about writing assessment items, see the Item Writing Training.
[1] Kopriva, R. (2000). Ensuring accuracy in testing for English language learners. Washington, DC: Council of Chief State School Officers.