Using Classical Test Theory and Rasch Modeling to Improve General Chemistry Exams on a Per Instructor Basis
-
Benjamin Sorenson [1] ; Kenneth Hanson [1]
-
[1] Florida State University
Florida State University
Estados Unidos
-
- Localización: Journal of chemical education, ISSN 0021-9584, Vol. 98, Nº 5, 2021, págs. 1529-1538
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
-
Resumen
Exams are a critical part of our current teaching paradigm and are used to assign grades, evaluate teaching strategies, and more. Unfortunately, in the absence of shared/standardized exams, the exam creation often rests solely on individual instructors whose decisions are frequently guided by intuition. Here we show that, even on a single general chemistry instructor/classroom basis, exam quality can be improved by using (1) classical testing theory and Rasch modeling to guide reused question selection and (2) a few general, multiple choice question design criteria. Even after only two and three iterations, we observed a dramatic improvement in both question and overall exam quality in nearly every quantitative metric. We also use real outcomes to show that (1) there is no evidence that students have access to previous exams or if they do it does not increase their performance on repeated questions, and (2) a semester-to-semester change in exam averages may not reflect student abilities but instead could be due to changes in question difficulty.
