Useful Guidelines for Classroom Tests Construction

In the field of education, we use a variety of test items for measuring various learning outcomes. We usually think that all of them are equally valid and reliable in measuring the desired learning outcomes. But, unfortunately, it is not always true, in fact, its validity and reliability is subject to its careful construction and applications. Therefore, it is necessary to specify some rules for its construction. Test specialist/experts have suggested some general rules for constructing various test items. Here I am going to tell you about some of the general rules of test construction. While pacific rules for each type of test items will be discussed later.

1.    Write more test items than needed. So it would be possible to replace one item, if it seemed inadequate to you during the final review, by another suitable item.

2.    All the test items should be exclusively constructed, so that one test item may not be used for answering another test item by the test taker.

3.    The wording and phrasing of test items should be simple and not beyond the learned vocabulary of the students.

4.    Test items should be written in advance. In other words, It will be better to write down test items during each instructional session. So you will have a sufficient repository of test items at the end of an educational episode.

5.    One test item should represent only one problem at a time.

6.    Write test items in such a way that every test item would  have one and only one correct or agreed upon answer.

7.    Use table of specifications as a guide when you are constructing a test.

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Table Of Specifications

Table of specification is a two-way chart which is constructed by the class teacher before the development of any classroom test. The main function of this chart is to ensure that all the important content areas have been included in the test and nothing worth assessment has been left behind. It guides the teacher in the process of test construction. It is like a blue print of a test. It shows the relationship between the content areas and the performance objectives. It usually consists of general instructional objectives, specific learning outcomes (derived from those general objectives), instructional contents (which indicate the area wherein the students are expected to show the desired performance) and the relative weights (which are usually represented by percentages in the table) given to each content area. The construction of table of specifications generally involves the following steps.
1. Specify general educational objectives.
2. Specify learning outcomes in light of the general educational objectives.
3. Specify the content areas in which the students would be assessed.
4. Specify the number of test items to be included in the test for each content area.
For example if a class teacher wants to construct a classroom test of 25 items on the topic of curriculum his/her table of specification may look like as follows.

Content Areas	General Objectives
	Knowledge	Understand		Application		Analyze		Total Items
	Specific Learning Outcomes
	Define	Explain	Compare	Apply	Use	Analyze	Criticize
Curriculum	2 2 2	1 1 2	1 1 1	1 1 1	1 1 1	1 1 1	1 1 1	8 8 9
Nature Types Models
Total Items	6	4	3	3	3	3	3	25

Looking at the above table of specification, we see that the test consists of 25 test items in which eight items are about the nature of curriculum, eight items about the Types of curriculum and nine items about the various models of curriculum. This test may be either objective type or subjective type or a mix of both types, it depends solely on the discretion of a class teacher.

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