How can we ensure the validity of the test?
Show After going through all the effort of developing an online test, you want it to be an accurate measure. That’s why it’s so important to plan for online test reliability. In Are Your Online Tests Valid?, we examined test validity or how you can be sure a test measures what it claims to measure. Test validity is required before reliability can be considered in any meaningful way. You may want to read the previous article first. In this article, we’ll look at test reliability. A test with a high degree of reliability will be a more accurate measure of the learner’s knowledge and skills than one with low reliability. If you have trouble keeping all of these terms straight, think of it this way: reliability = consistency. Test Reliability Is ConsistencyTest reliability is an attempt to reduce the random errors that occur in all tests to a minimum. The way to reduce random errors is to make a test consistent. A test that is reliable or consistent has few variations within itself and produces similar results over time. This is often compared to a scale. If you weigh yourself every day and your weight is reasonably consistent, you consider the scale reliable. If the scale displays wildly different weights from day to day (even during the holidays), you would not consider it a reliable measure. Test reliability answers the question:
What Makes A Test Consistent?A test that is reliable will have a degree of consistency evidenced by these characteristics:
How To Improve Online Test Reliability
Relationship Of Reliability To ValidityA reliable test is not necessarily a valid test. A test can be internally consistent (reliable) but not be an accurate measure of what you claim to be measuring (validity). RESOURCES:
Get the latest articles, resources and freebies once a month plus my free eBook, Writing for Instructional Design. Posted by John Kleeman, Founder and Executive Director Content validity is one of the most important criteria on which to judge a test, exam or quiz. This blog post explains what content validity is, why it matters and how to increase it when using competence tests and exams within regulatory compliance and other work settings. What is content validity?An assessment has content validity if the content of the
assessment matches what is being measured, i.e. it reflects the knowledge/skills required to do a job or demonstrate that the participant grasps course content sufficiently. Why does content validity matter?If an assessment doesn’t have content validity, then the test isn’t actually testing what it seeks to, or it misses important aspects of job skills. Would you want to fly in a plane, where the pilot knows how to take off but not land? Obviously not! Assessments for airline pilots take account all job functions including landing in emergency scenarios. Similarly, if you are testing your employees to ensure competence for regulatory compliance purposes, or before you let them sell your products, you need to ensure the tests have content validity – that is to say they cover the job skills required. Additionally to these common sense reasons, if you use an assessment without content validity to make decisions about people, you could face a lawsuit. See this blog post, Six tips to increase reliability in Competence Tests and Exams, which describes a US lawsuit where a court ruled that because a policing test didn’t match the job skills, it couldn’t be used fairly for promotion purposes. How can you increase content validity?Here are some tips to get you started. For a deeper dive, Questionmark has several white papers that will help, and I also recommend Shrock & Coscarelli’s excellent book “Criterion-Referenced Test Development”.
I hope this blog post reminds you why content validity matters and gives helpful tips to improve the content validity of your tests. If you are using a Learning Management System to create and deliver assessments, you may struggle to obtain and demonstrate content validity. If you want to see how Questionmark software can help manage your assessments, request a demo today. |