Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (SEPT)
Definitive technical, professional and operational standards for all forms of assessments that are professionally developed and used in a variety of settings
Professional organizations that promulgated the SEPT standards
American Educational Research Association (AERA)
American Psychological Association (APA)
National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME)
The SEPT standards were last published in 1999 and the latest edition is from 2014
Parts of the SEPT standards
Part I: Foundation
Part II: Operations
Part III: Testing Applications
Test Construction
1. Identify major objectives
2. Identify population
3. Indicate possible conditions and uses
4. Planning of the test
5. Item writing
6. Preliminary tryout
7. Proper tryout
8. Final tryout
9. Reliability
10. Validity
11. Norms
12. Revising the test
13. Publishing the test
Item
A single question or task that is not often broken down into any smaller units
Characteristics of a good item
Clarity - no ambiguity
Moderately difficult
Discriminating power
To the point - measures only significant aspects
Not encourage guesswork
Clear in reading
Independent for its meaning
Preliminary tryout
1. Find out inadequacies, weaknesses, omissions, ambiguities
2. Difficulty level of each item
3. Time limit of test
4. Length of test
5. Standard directions
Proper tryout
1. Difficulty index
2. Discrimination index
3. Effectiveness of distractors
Final tryout
Provides a final check on administration and time limit
After final tryout, expert opinion should be considered again