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February
2007
Best
Practices
Item Writing Guidelines: Do We
Agree? (Part 2)
In Part
1 of this article I reviewed item writing guidelines
from the article: “A Review of Multiple-Choice
Item-Writing Guidelines for Classroom Assessment”
Applied Measurement in Education, 2002, 15(3)
309-334, by Thomas Haladyna, Steven Dowling and Michael
Rodriguez. In this continuation I would like to look
a little more closely at two of the 31 item-writing
guidelines they include in their taxonomy:
Base each item
on important content to learn; avoid trivial content.
Use novel material
to test higher level learning. Paraphrase textbook
language or language used during instruction when
used in a test item to avoid testing for simple recall.