In test development for education and certification, an item is the basic building block of any test or assessment. Items can be questions, tasks, prompts or similar. They may require test takers to select a response from a set of choices or to generate their own response based on the information or parameters provided. Common examples include: multiple-choice questions, true/false questions, short-answer questions and open-ended essay prompts.
Yet, whatever form an item may take, it has a single purpose: to help measure test takers’ knowledge, skills and/or abilities as accurately as possible.
Tests and assessments are valuable tools for education and certification. Tests and assessments allow test takers the opportunity to demonstrate what they know and what they can do. They also provide administrators with evidence of test takers’ skills and help them to identify specific areas for improvement.
Item writing refers to the process of constructing the items required for a given test or assessment. The people who write these items are called item writers.
An educational or certification assessment typically requires the expertise of multiple item writers. Depending on the assessment’s goals and characteristics, the team of item writers may be selected for similar or complementary qualifications. Those qualifications may include: relevant master’s and doctoral degrees; experience as a teacher and educator; item writing training and experience; expertise in the test’s subject matter; and expertise and experience serving the target test-taking population.
In order to construct the best assessment possible, it’s important to select the right item writers with the right qualifications. But item writers aren’t the only ones who ensure that test items are ready for test takers. High-stakes projects also require the expertise of reviewers, psychometricians, editors and other professionals according to the chosen plan.
Processes may vary from one item writing project to another, but a carefully-considered and documented workflow is a crucial component for item writing success. Here at Responsive Translation we also recommend iterative processes, which we use to ensure greater quality, efficiency and cost savings. You can read more about our item development services in Spanish and other languages here.
Responsive Translation provides foreign-language services for K-12 education, employee assessment and skill certification. This includes item development, instructional design and authentic passage review, as well as translation, adaptation, validation and review for assessments and other educational materials. For additional information, please get in touch at 646-847-3309 or [email protected].