Psychometric Testing
Psychometric testing is the engine behind reliable interpretation of your test data. How do you know whether your test is not too easy or too difficult? How do you know whether two test forms are equivalent? How do you determine the cut-off score? How can you see whether items favour one group of students over the other? Cito has the expertise and the experience to help you with these and more questions, both by training you on Psychometric testing and in all aspects of the use of Psychometric testing in and for educational assessment.
Why psychometric testing?
Working with psychometric testing requires a different attitude towards testing in addition to the classical approach to testing. Cito offers capacity building on psychometric testing for professionals in education such as teachers, managers and policy makers.
- Psychometric testing is a powerful means to analyze the data that your assessment instruments generate by statistical methods. The insights this gives can be used in all steps of test development and of test use, such as in item banking, test design, standard setting, reporting and to ensure fairness.
- One of the main reasons why test developers choose psychometric testing is that it provides a whole range of sophisticated methods to tailor the content and the difficulty of a test (or a test system) to its intended use.
- One of the main reasons why educational organizations (such as school boards, governments) choose psychometric testing is that it gives them the most reliable information from their tests, for a large range of purposes, from reporting to students and teachers to the evaluation of an educational assessment system.
Do you recognize these issues?
- "How can we get the most out of our tests, so that we can provide all stakeholders with the most reliable information while keeping test time limited?"
- "We get complaints from students, teachers and/or parents that the results of the test do not match the class performance. How can we investigate whether this is really the case or not, and if it isn’t, how can we explain this clearly to these stakeholders?"
- "We conduct our tests in several languages. How can we ensure that these tests are equivalent?"
- "We make a new test each year for the same subject for comparable groups of students. How can we recognize whether a different performance is caused by the test being more difficult or more easy, or by the group of students being stronger or weaker?"
Tailor-made solutions
Our strength is that we work with you. We listen to you and will do all to understand your specific context, your specific needs and your specific goals. This is, to us, the starting point for delivering complete, integrated services.
Our experience
- Netherlands: Equating the yearly national examinations for secondary schools for more than 300 exams
- Kazakhstan: psychometric support and psychometric capacity building of staff for the implementation of student monitoring systems in mathematics and languages for Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools
- Switzerland: use of our new standard setting method ("3DC") for Institute for Educational Evaluation, University of Zurich