Graduate students at a local college wanted to predict the probability of success for each 1st-year student. During the summer, they developed a multiple choice test with 50 items based on interviews from 1st-year students at the end of the previous year. When they asked permission to give the test to this year's students, the Dean asked for evidence of test reliability and validity. The graduate students replied the test showed a coefficient alpha of .92 and that the test had evidence of validity based on content. The Dean replied that validity evidence based on content validity was not good enough. The Dean asked them to submit a plan for gathering evidence of validity based on the tests relations with some external criteria. Provide a plan for a validation study that the graduate
students can give to the Dean.
What will be an ideal response?
• The answer should discuss either a predictive or concurrent validation strategy.
• The test taker must identify a criterion for success and how the criterion will be measured and indicate when and to whom the test will be administered and when the criterion will be measured.
• The test taker should refer to correlation of the predictor and criterion as the means for obtaining a validity coefficient.
• Discussion of strengths, weaknesses, and reliability of the criterion would be appropriate as well as using linear regression to make predictions of success.
• Finally, the best answers will also point out that assuming that one type of evidence for validity is a priori better than another type of evidence may be inappropriate.
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