Exam Design and Psychometrics
However mystifying and unpronounceable ‘psychometrics’ seems, it’s just a way to refer to the processes that make your tests fair, sound, interpretable, and most of all defensible.
Yardstick provides the psychometric services your organization requires for all stages of the Assessment Life Cycle. We specialize in demystifying the processes so that you can trust that your candidates are being evaluated fairly, and that your examination program is defensible.
Exam Blueprinting and Test Assembly
Hand-assembling a test to match your test blueprint is difficult work. You may succeed in creating a test that has many of the right characteristics, but often at the expense of other aspects of your blueprint. For example, you might represent the various content areas in the right proportions, but have too many ‘straight recall’ items. Or you might have too many ‘C’s as correct answers. Or the difficulty of items within one content area might be different from another.
Yardstick uses sophisticated test assembly software to pull the right items from your item bank in order to fulfill your test blueprint precisely and fairly, ensuring your formative and summative assessments are perfect. The completed test is instantly available for you to validate, not create. You can even use our tools to swap out particular items, allowing you to perfect your assessment.
Instructor-led Psychometric Testing 101
A comprehensive psychometric analysis of the performance of your tests and the items that comprise them is essential to ensuring the effectiveness of your assessment program, as well as to the fair evaluation of your candidates. As one of Yardstick’s core services, this analysis is focused not only on providing your organization with the most pertinent statistical indices, but also gives you specific and easily interpretable information about the strengths and weaknesses of your tests and items relative to their intended goals.
Creating High Quality Examinations
So, you’re a member of an organization that needs a new certification exam, or to revise an existing one. You know what it takes to be a competent and successful professional, but how do you build an exam to find out if your candidates know? Yardstick helps you to find out! First, we help you to clarify the purpose of your exam, and to take an inventory of the abilities, skills, and knowledge that you want your candidates to have mastered. Then we help you to turn that inventory into a test blueprint for an exam, a test blueprint that has clear specifications for the numbers and types of items, the relative emphasis of the different content areas, the cognitive complexity of those items, and a plan for how to author, assemble, and analyze the test’s performance.
Formative and Summative Assessments
However mystifying and unpronounceable psychometrics seems, it’s just a way to refer to the processes that make your tests fair, sound, and interpretable. At Yardstick we provide you with the psychometric support and services you need, for any stage in your assessment cycle. As well we help demystify the process, so you can trust your candidates are being evaluated fairly, and your organization can have confidence in the results.
Standard Setting
Distinguishing between competent and not yet competent candidates is the rationale of testing programs in the licensure / certification space. Standard Setting is the process by which a passing score on an exam is established and validated. We can facilitate this process for you, helping your experts efficiently and effectively identify a legally defensible passing score for your exam. In addition, we can conduct this process either in person or on the web with your subject matter experts participating from around the country, or the world.
Item and Exam Statistical Analysis
A comprehensive analysis of the performance of your tests and the items that comprise them is essential to ensuring the effectiveness of your assessment program, as well as to the fair evaluation of your candidates. As one of Yardstick’s core services, this analysis is focused not only on providing your organization with the most pertinent statistical indices, but also gives you specific and easily interpretable information about the strengths and weaknesses of your tests and items relative to their intended goals.