Psychological Test Construction Steps

Construction is a Set of Activities involved in a developing and evaluating a test of some psychological function

Adaptation is a process of which a test is transformed from source language or culture into a target group.

Psychological tests are often subject centered measurements and follow certain strict guidelines for construction, administration, scoring and interpretation.

Following steps are followed during construction of a test:-

v Identification of primary purpose for which the test scores will be used.

v Identifying behaviour that represent the construct or define the domain

v Prepare a set of test specific specification, delineating the proportion of items that should focus on each type of behaviour.

v Construct an initial pool of items.

v Review of items

v Pilot test of the revised items

v Modification of Items

v Field test has items on a large sample representative of the examinee population of whom test is indented

v Determine statistical properties of items score

v Design and conduct reliability and validity studies for the final form of the test

v Develop Guidelines for  administration, scoring and interpretation of test scores

Principles of Item Writing

Writing good items is a precorros to developing a good psychometric test.

1) A researcher needs a literature survey before commencing item writing.

2) Language should be unpretentious, upfront, suitable and simple in nature.

3) Language should be of reading level of target population.

4) Researcher should avoid using trendy expressions, idioms and other language forms.

Format of Items

The test developer also has to choose the format in which the test items would be written. The two dominant response formats are

Dichotomous responding.( True, false and yes, no)

Lickert type rating scale with three or more options

Sample Size

McQuity suggested that it is important to determine the minimum sample size required in order to achieve a desired level of statistical power with a given model prior to data collection.