Educational Psychology

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2. Cues that are not related the content being examined.
   
   
   • A common clue is that all the true statements on a true/false test or the corrective alternatives on a
     multiple choice test are longer than the untrue statements or the incorrect alternatives.
   
   
   
   


3. Using negatives (or double negatives) the items.
   
   
   • A poor item. “True or False: None of the steps made by the student was unnecessary.”
   
   
   • A better item. True or False: “All of the steps were necessary.”
     Students often do not notice the negative terms or find them confusing so avoiding them is generally
     recommended (Linn & Miller 2005). However, since standardized tests often use negative items, teachers
     sometimes deliberately include some negative items to give students practice in responding to that format.
   
   
   
   


4. Taking sentences directly from textbook or lecture notes.
   Removing the words from their context often makes them ambiguous or can change the meaning. For
   example, a statement from Chapter 3 taken out of context suggests all children are clumsy. “Similarly with
   jumping, throwing and catching: the large majority of children can do these things, though often a bit
   clumsily.” A fuller quotation makes it clearer that this sentence refers to 5-year-olds: For some fives, running
   still looks a bit like a hurried walk, but usually it becomes more coordinated within a year or two. Similarly
   with jumping, throwing and catching: the large majority of children can do these things, though often a bit
   clumsily, by the time they start school, and most improve their skills noticeably during the early elementary
   years.” If the abbreviated form was used as the stem in a true/false item it would obviously be misleading.


5. Avoid trivial questions
   e.g. Jean Piaget was born in what year?
   a) 1896
   b) 1900
   c) 1880
   d) 1903
   While it important to know approximately when Piaget made his seminal contributions to the understanding of
   child development, the exact year of his birth (1880) is not important.

Strengths and weaknesses

All types of selected response items have a number of strengths and weaknesses. True/False items are
appropriate for measuring factual knowledge such as vocabulary, formulae, dates, proper names, and technical
terms. They are very efficient as they use a simple structure that students can easily understand, and take little time
to complete. They are also easier to construct than multiple choice and matching items. However, students have a
50 per cent probability of getting the answer correct through guessing so it can be difficult to interpret how much
students know from their test scores. Examples of common problems that arise when devising true/false items are
in Table 37.

Educational Psychology 250 A Global Text