Chapter 7: Essay Items

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Chapter 7 Essay Items

• Part II How to Develop, Administrate, and Score
  Written Tests

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Skills to Learn From This Chapter

• Identify advantages and limitations of essay
  items.
• Identify qualities desired in an essay item.
• Evaluate essay items for these qualities.
• Score students responses to essay items.

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True or False

• Essay items, like short-answer items, can only
  measure declarative knowledge. T F
• You can almost always make up something for essay
  items to get some points. T F

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Critique a Quote From the Textbook

• the essay format is predominately used in
  secondary schools and postsecondary school
  settings (page 71).
• Agree? Disagree? What evidence do you have to
  support your position?

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Advantages of Essay Items

• Essay items tend to measure more directly
  behaviors specified by performance objective.
• Performance objective Students will be able to
  state the relative advantages of fluorescent and
  incandescent light bulbs.
• Essay Item State the relative advantages of
  fluorescent and incandescent light bulbs.
• Essay items can examine students ability to
  communicate idea in writing.
• Is it fair to the students with low ability in
  writing?

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Advantages of Essay Items

• Essay items require the student to supply the
  response.
• That is why some students prefer multiple-choice
  format.
• 7.1 Apply What You Are Learning (page 72).

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Limitations of Essay Items

• Essay items usually provide a less-adequate
  sampling of the content.
• Can you put a lot of essay items (say 4) in a
  unit test? Why?
• The scoring of essay items is less reliable.
• What problems can arise when you score essays?
•  Essay tests are more time-consuming to score.
• 7.2 Apply What You Are Learning (page 73).

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Identifying Qualities Desired in Essay Items

• Desirability of Using Brief-Response versus
  Extended-Response Questions
• In-class activity 1, Chapter 7
• Compare brief-response versus extended-response
  questions using a comparison matrix.

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Criteria for Evaluating Essay Items

• Does the item measure the specified skill?
• 7.3 Apply What You Are Learning (page 74).
•  
• Is the level of reading skill required by this
  item below the student ability?
•  

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Criteria for Evaluating Essay Items

• Will all or almost all student answer this item
  in less than 10 minutes?
• Will the scoring plan result in different readers
  assigning similar score to a given students
  response?
• Total number of points.
• Specific attributes.
• Criterion for awarding points. (page 75)
• Start from performance objective -gt test item -gt
  attributes-gtcriterion for scoring.

7.4 Apply What You Are Learning (page 77).
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Criteria for Evaluating Essay Items

• Does the scoring plan describe a correct and
  complete response?
• No proper grading can be done if you do not know
  what a correct and complete response is.
• 7.5 Apply What You are Learning (page 78)

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Criteria for Evaluating Essay Items

• Is the item written in such a way that the
  scoring plan will be obvious to knowledgeable
  students?
• What could have gone wrong if most of the
  students proficient in that area responded in
  such a way that the answers are all scored low?

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• Practice Applying These Desired Qualities to
  Essay Items (pages 78-81)

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In-class activity 2, Chapter 7

• Using a graphic organizer to represent the
  section of Scoring Students Responses to Essay
  Items (pages 81-83).

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