Creating a test blueprint for a progress testing program: A paired-comparisons approach

Creating a new testing program requires the development of a test blueprint that will determine how the items on each test form are distributed across possible content areas and practice domains. To achieve validity, categories of a blueprint are typically based on the judgments of content experts. How experts judgments are elicited and combined is important to the quality of resulting test blueprints.

Content experts in dentistry participated in a day-long faculty-wide workshop to discuss, refine, and confirm the categories and their relative weights. After reaching agreement on categories and their definitions, experts judged the relative importance between category pairs, registering their judgments anonymously using iClicker, an audience response system. Judgments were combined in two ways: a simple calculation that could be performed during the workshop and a multidimensional scaling of the judgments performed later.

Content experts were able to produce a set of relative weights using this approach. The multidimensional scaling yielded a three-dimensional model with the potential to provide deeper insights into the basis of the experts' judgments.

The approach developed and demonstrated in this study can be applied across academic disciplines to elicit and combine content experts judgments for the development of test blueprints.