Computer-Based Testing and the Internet: Issues and Advances - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 047001721X ISBN 13: 9780470017210

Verlag: Wiley, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Internationally there is a growing number of professionals administering psychological tests by computer. Computer Based Testing and The Internet highlights four main themes that define current issues, technical advances and applications: advances in computer based testing, including test designs; operational issues, including security and legal issues; new uses for tests in employment and credentialing; and future of computer based testing. Each contributor addresses issues of control, quality, security and technology within the subject matter of their particular chapters providing an excellent overview.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dave Bartram is Past President of the International Test commission and is heading ITC projects on international guidelines for standards in test use and standards for computer-based testing and the Internet. He is Chair of the British Psychological Society's Steering Committee on Test Standards and Convenor of the European Federation of Psychologists' Associations Standing Committee on Tests and Testing. He is President-Elect of the IAAP's Division 2.

Professor Bartram is Research Director for SHL Group plc. Prior to his appointment with SHL in 1998, he was Dean of the Faculty of Science and the Environment, and Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Hull. He is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS) and a Fellow of the Ergonomics Society. In 2004 he received the BPS award for Distinguished Contributions to Professional Psychology. His specialist area is computer-based testing and Internet assessment systems. Within SHL he is leading the development of their next generation of Internet-based delivery systems and the development of a multi-dimensional generic Competency Framework.

He has published large numbers of popular, professional and academic articles and book chapters, and has been the Senior Editor of the BPS Test Reviews. He has been an editor or co-author of several works including the 1992, 1995 and 1997 BPS Reviews of Psychometric Tests; Organisational Effectiveness: the Role of Psychology (with Ivan Robertson and Militza Callinan, published in 2002 by Wiley)and the BPS Open Learning Programme for Level A (Occupational) Test Use (with Pat Lindley, published by BPS Blackwell in 1994.

Ronald K. Hambleton holds the title of Distinguished University Professor and is Chairperson of the research and Evaluation Methods Program and Executive Director of the Center for Educational Assessment at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the United States. He earned a B.A. in 1966 from the University of Waterloo in Canada with majors in mathematics and psychology, and an M.A. in 1967 and Ph.D. in 1969 from the University of Toronto with specialties in psychometric methods and statistics. Professor Hambleton teaches graduate-level courses in educational and psychological testing, item response theory and applications, and classical test theory models and methods, and offers seminar courses on applied measurement topics. He is co-author of several textbooks including (with H. Swaminathan and H. Jane Rogers) Fundamentals of Item Response Theory (published by Sage in 1991) and Item response Theory: Principles and App0licaitons (published by Kluwer in 1985), and co-editor of several books including International Perspectives on Academic Assessment ( with Thomas Oakland, published by Kluwer in 1995), Handbook of Modern Item response Theory ( with Wim van der Linden, published by Springer in 1997) and Adaptation of Educational and Psychological Tests for Cross-Cultural Assessment ( with Peter Merenda and Charles Spielberger, Published by Earlbaum in 2005). His research interests are in the areas of item response model applications to educational achievement and credentialing exams, standard-setting, test adaptation methodology, score reporting and computer-base testing. he has received several honors and awards for his more than 35 years of measurement research including honorary doctorates from Umea University in Sweden and the University of Oviedo in Spain, the 1994, National Council on Measurement in Education Career Award, the 2003Association of Test Publisher National Award for Contributions to Computer-Based Testing, and the 2005 E.F. Lindquist Award for Contributions to Assessment. Professor Hambleton is a frequent consultant to state department  of education, national government agencies  and credentialing organizations.

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No topic is more central to innovation and current practice in testing and assessment today than computers and the Internet. This timely publication highlights for main themes that define current issues, technical advances and applications of computer-based testing.

• Advances in computer-based testing-new test designs, item selection algorithms, exposure control issues and methods, and new tests that capitalize on the power of computer technology.
• Operation issues-systems design, test security, and legal and ethical matters.
• New and improved uses-for tests in employment and credentialing.
• The future of computer-based testing-identifying potential issues, developments, major advances and problems to overcome.

Written by internationally recognized contributors, each chapter focuses on issues of control, quality, security and technology. These issues provide the basic structure for the International Test Commission's new Guidelines on Computer-Based Testing and Testing on the Internet. the contributions to this book have played a key role in the development of these guidelines.

Computer-Based Testing and the Internet is a comprehensive guide for all professionals, academics and practitioners working in the fields of education, credentialing, personnel testing and organizational assessment. It will also be of value of students developing expertise in these areas.

Aus dem Klappentext

No topic is more central to innovation and current practice in testing and assessment today than computers and the Internet. This timely publication highlights for main themes that define current issues, technical advances and applications of computer-based testing.

• Advances in computer-based testing-new test designs, item selection algorithms, exposure control issues and methods, and new tests that capitalize on the power of computer technology.
• Operation issues-systems design, test security, and legal and ethical matters.
• New and improved uses-for tests in employment and  credentialing.
• The future of computer-based testing-identifying potential issues, developments, major advances and problems to overcome.

Written by internationally recognized contributors, each chapter focuses on issues of control, quality, security and technology. These issues provide the basic structure for the International Test Commission's new Guidelines on Computer-Based Testing and Testing on the Internet. the contributions to this book have played a key role in the development of these guidelines.

Computer-Based Testing and the internet is a comprehensive guide for all professionals, academics and practitioners working in the fields of education, credentialing, personnel testing and organizational assessment. It will also be of value of students developing expertise in these areas.

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Computer-Based Testing and the Internet

Issues and AdvancesBy Dave Bartram

John Wiley & Sons, (UK)

Copyright © 2005 Dave Bartram
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780470017210

Chapter One

Testing on the Internet: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities in the Field of Occupational Assessment

Dave Bartram SHL Group plc, UK

This chapter starts by considering what the Internet is and what it can it offer in relation to testing and assessment in the work and organisational field. It then goes on to take a look into the future and consider a range of practical and good practice issues. In considering testing on the Internet we need to consider both the technical strengths and weaknesses of the Internet itself (as a transport medium) and the limitations that the WWW technology imposes on the design of tests and control over their delivery. Throughout the chapter, the emphasis will be on the use of computer-based and web-based testing in the field of occupational assessment. Other chapters in this volume consider applications in other fields, notably educational testing and testing for licensing and certification.

COMPUTER-BASED TESTING (CBT) BEFORE THE INTERNET

The main value of CBT historically has been in the area of report generation. Some of the earliest systems (back in the days before personal computers) were designed to automate the scoring and interpretation of instruments such as the MMPI. With the advent of the personal computer, we saw the development of computer-administered versions of paper and pencil tests. These provided some advantages over paper and pencil, in terms of control of administration, and some disadvantages (e.g. the need for sufficient hardware to test groups of people). They also raised the question of equivalence with their paper and pencil counterparts. Most research (see Bartram, 2005; Mead & Drasgow, 1993) has tended to show that equivalence was not a major problem so long as the tests were not speeded measures of ability.

Bartram (1997) commented on the fact that, despite the potential offered by technology for novel forms of assessment, the literature on computer-based assessment (CBA) within occupational assessment settings has been largely confined to a small number of issues. These have been dominated by the issues relating to the parallel use of computer-based and paper-based versions of the same tests and use of computers to generate descriptive and interpretative reports of test results (for reviews, see Bartram and Bayliss, 1984; Bartram, 1987b, 1989, 1993, 1994, 2005).

INNOVATION IN COMPUTER-BASED TESTING

Despite the increasing sophistication of computer-based assessment systems, within the field of occupational assessment the tests they contain are, typically, computer implementations of old paper-and-pencil tests. Nevertheless, there has been innovation in the field and the consequences of that innovation are increasingly finding their way into commercial practice. Tests can be innovative in a number of different ways. The most obvious is where the actual test content is innovative. However, innovation can also occur in less obvious ways. The process used to construct the test may be innovative and rely on computer technology and the nature of the scoring of the items may be innovative. In practice there is an interaction between these different aspects of innovation, in that some of the most interesting developments in test content also involve innovation in how that content is created.

For computer-based testing, the most obvious examples of content innovation can be found where tests use sound or video to create multi-media items. Drasgow, Olson-Buchanan and Moberg (1999) describe a full-motion interactive video assessment, which uses video clips followed by multiple choice questions. Simulations can also be run on computer to provide realistic work-sample assessments. Hanson, Borman, Mogilka, Manning, and Hedge (1999), for example, describe the development of a computer-based performance measure for air traffic control selection and Bartram (Bartram & Dale, 1983; Bartram, 1987a) describes the use of a simplified landing simulator for use in pilot selection.

Innovation in content also relates to the use of more dynamic item types, for example, where drag-and-drop or other familiar Windows-based operations are used rather than the simple point-and-click simulation of paper-and-pencil multiple-response. A review of this area of innovation in item types is presented by Drasgow and Mattern in Chapter 3.

Innovation in content, however, is often associated with novel methods of content generation. Item generation techniques have provided the potential for a whole host of new item types as well as more efficient production of conventional items. Bartram (2002a), and Goeters and Lorenz (2002) describe the use of generative techniques to develop a wide range of task-based and item-based tests for use in pilot selection. It is worth noting, however, that most of the developments in this area of innovation have occurred in areas where selection leads to very high cost training or into high risk occupations or both (as is the case for trainee military pilot selection). Innovation is expensive, and the sort of tests described in the papers referred to above have required extensive research and development programmes. However, as in all areas of testing, the lessons learned from this work will result in benefits in due course for the general field of occupational assessment.

Computer software provides for the recording of very detailed information about a test-taker's performance. In addition to the response given to an item, we can record how long the person took to respond. We can also record information about choices made and changed during the process of responding. For more complex item types we can track the performance of the person as they work their way through a task or series of subtasks. Bartram (2002b) reported validation data from the use of a set of computer-based ability tests that were administered without any time limit. These were designed for use in a diagnostic mode for people entering further education training courses. Time to respond was normed independently for each item and response latency was scored together with accuracy to produce a measure of efficiency. This efficiency score had higher validity than the traditional number correct score.

While there has been some experimentation in the use of response latency data for checking response stability (Fekken & Jackson, 1988) and socially desirable responding (Holden & Fekken, 1988; George & Skinner, 1990a, 1990b), these approaches have not been developed into practical applications for general use in personnel selection or other areas of I/O assessment as yet.

Item Response Theory (IRT) has been with us since the 1980s (Lord, 1980), but its application has tended to be confined to educational and some large-scale occupational uses. It has not been generally applied in the area of occupational assessment until relatively recently. IRT has the considerable advantage of approaching test construction from the item level. Its application to routine occupational assessment has become possible with the advent of better data collection and data management procedures. IRT has many advantages over traditional methods; however it also comes with some costs: the need for larger samples of data with which to determine the properties of items. Although computer technology has provided the possibility of implementing adaptive testing using (in particular where it is...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wiley
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 047001721X
• ISBN 13: 9780470017210
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Herausgeber: Bartram Dave, Hambleton Ron
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Wiley-VCH GmbH; product_safety@wiley.com; ; Boschstrasse 12; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland