TEST DEVELOPMENT

L

ike for a lesson or course objective, a test item is the product of the interaction of two domains: the subject matter or content domain; and the domain of cognitive, affective, or psychomotor behaviour. For the development of cognitive skill, for example, an objective for a lesson in algebra might be: “at the end of the lesson the learners will be able to analyse an expression involving an unknown up to the third power” or for a lesson in English comprehension: “at the end of the lesson the learners will be able to critically analyse all the sentences in a paragraph”.  For the first objective, the content domain is algebra and for the second it is English comprehension but for both objectives, the cognitive domain is analysis behaviour. So each lesson objective represent a marriage of two domains (see Figure 1). Similarly, an item designed to assess the extent to which a lesson objective has been met, is an interaction between these two domains. For example: “explain the process of photosynthesis” or “prepare a culture with which amino acids could be identified” Hence In this case while the subject matter is the same – biology; the human behaviour in the first item is comprehension while in the second item it is application.

         Test development involves the translation of a course content into tasks, statement, or questions (items) which when presented to the testees, under controlled condition, will provoke or elicit from them the type and amount of behaviour called for in the course objective such that a testee’s responses or reactions to the items reflect how much of the desired behaviour or knowledge he/she has or has acquired.  So an item like: “which one of the following four options shows the correct procedure for analysing the given expression with X raised to power three?” indicates an interaction between algebra, a subject matter, and analysis, a cognitive behaviour. To effectively utilize this principle in test development, a table of specification (TOS) or test blueprint is developed to guide item construction. TOS is a two-dimensional arrangement which brings together, in one dimension, aspects of the subject matter covered and for which the test is developed to assess and in the second dimension, levels of the cognitive behaviour intended to be developed among the learners. An analysis of human cognitive behaviour as presented by Bloom and his colleagues (1956) provides the basis for assessing the development of different levels of human cognitive ability through education. These levels are: memory, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation learning attainment. Similar analysis has been done for affective and psychomotor skills.