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Item difficulty and discrimination as a function of stem completeness.

C Violato1

  • 1Department of Teacher Education and Supervision, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Psychological Reports
|December 1, 1991
PubMed
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Stem completeness in multiple-choice questions does not impact item difficulty or discrimination. This suggests that variations in stem construction do not affect the reliability of these assessment tools.

Area of Science:

  • Educational Measurement
  • Psychometrics

Background:

  • Multiple-choice items are widely used in educational assessments.
  • The construction of these items, specifically stem completeness, may influence their psychometric properties.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To experimentally investigate the impact of stem completeness on item difficulty and discrimination.
  • To examine potential interaction effects between stem completeness and student achievement levels.

Main Methods:

  • A two-way factorial design (stem completeness x achievement level) was employed.
  • 166 junior education students were categorized into low, medium, and high achievement groups.
  • Subjects were randomly assigned to receive a multiple-choice test with either complete or incomplete stems.

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Main Results:

  • Stem completeness demonstrated no significant effect on item difficulty.
  • Stem completeness did not influence item discrimination.
  • No significant interaction effect was found between stem completeness and student achievement levels.

Conclusions:

  • Multiple-choice items appear robust in measuring knowledge, regardless of stem construction variations.
  • Stem completeness is not a critical factor affecting the psychometric quality of multiple-choice test items.