PSYC 3250 Chapter Notes - Chapter 11: Factor Analysis, Cluster Sampling, The Dilemma

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 3250
• Professor: David Stanley

Document Summary

The first and in some ways most fundamental, decision faced by test developers is what type of items they should used. Guion noted that item types can thought of as continuum. Although a range of item types are available it is nevertheless true that the choice that they must often face is between a format that requires persons to produce or construct a response with minimum or significance structure. Advocates of the constructed response methods argue that these tests measure a wide and richer array of human abilities and skills than those measured by multiple-choice. On the contrary, research on the characteristics of these two types of items typically suggests that mc items are a better choice than essay or other constructed responses for a few reasons: It is very hard to develop reliable methods of scoring constructed response items. Any method of scoring these items is likely to be labor intensive, expensive and slow.