Chapter Thirteen
Achievement tests can measure students’ amount of knowledge on any topic. Considered as broadly informative, these tests are common across all educational institutions. They can test a group of students or individual students, usually, with special needs. Such tests are typically administered to test multilevel areas. Test developers keenly make use of achievement tests to get complete information and be able to see the progress or weaknesses of students in specific areas of learning. An exception is teacher-made tests that exclusively deal with one selected area. The example of teacher-made tests speaks to me since all the major preparation work is done by the subject teacher. These are usually specific tests administered to assess definite needs in the topic area.
All achievement tests are purpose-serving tests. Their basic roles include defining the most important areas of assessment, dividing of students in groups and diagnosing the students’ strengths and weaknesses. More advanced types of tests stand for assessing the course program success. Much has been debated about standardized tests so far, which are extensive in their nature and development. Standardization is a procedure due to which reliable and valid tests can be brought to the public.
For teachers, a big query can be scoring on achievement tests. For that part, I consider item response theory (IRS) a helpful way of scoring that basically looks at different patterns of responses. Even when several students have obtained equal score, their pattern of responding can differ. Based on those differences in difficulty level, the teachers are able to select the more difficult questions that students answered correctly and compare them to more easy questions that have correct answers. The score is higher if the number of correct answers for the difficult questions prevails.
