Constructing Achievement Tests

It has become almost a tradition to consider as the only necessary equipment for one engaged in educational measurement some ingenuity in translating subject-matter content into short-answer forms of questions and familiarity with the statistical methods of computing central tendencies, percentiles, the standard deviation, and the coefficient of correlation. Probably this conception has developed because of the types of problems which historically have received the focus of attention in the construction of tests for elementary and secondary schools.