Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemSetting standards: a comparison of two Rasch-Model methods( 1998)Standard setting is an important issue in education. This study has applied two Rasch model techniques, Angoffs sum of probability and Andrich's pairwise comparison, to set cutoff scores for a Tasmanian Year 9 Link Test at year 3, year 5 and year 8 level. The main focus of the study was to examine methods of setting cutoff scores in the context of the National Profiles. The study also aimed at examining the relative difficulty of two parts of the Link Test on Mathematics for Year 9 students in Tasmania. Standard setting issues were analysed in the light of criterion referenced assessment in terms of their purposes and implications in education and measurement. Review of previous standard setting methods was also done. The two methods applied in the study were Angoff's sum of probabilities and Andrich's pairwise comparison. Both are popular in the educational context for establishing cutoff scores and examining the difficulty levels of tests. The findings produced by the sum of probability method have shown that cutoff score at each level of part 1 was higher than that of part 2, so that part 2 of the Link Test was more difficult than part 1. It was consistent with the item estimates produced by the pairwise comparison method. The correlations were high and significant at 0.05 level. It was consistent to those findings by Andrich and Titmanis (1997). However, the correlations between item difficulty estimates established by the pairwise comparison and empirical data were low from 0.39. The study has shown the possibility of using the two Rasch model techniques, sum of probability and pairwise comparison to establish cutoff score and examine the relative difficulty of the tests. Pairwise comparison method could be used as a mean of checking the validity of the proposed standards. It was shown that further research in this field should be done.
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ItemIntegrating formative and summative assessments: finding time-efficient ways to support student learning and teacher reporting( 2009)This study has set out to find ways in which the formative and summative goals of assessment could be achieved using the same instruments. The motivation for this integration of goals was to achieve time efficiencies, so that teachers could implement formative assessment in a way that would have minimal impact on their time. The researcher developed five short questionnaires, referred to in this thesis as recap sheets. These consisted of questions on the Measurement topic and were used by the researcher as well as another teacher at the same school with their respective Year Seven classes. A third teacher participated in the study and did not use the recap sheets. At the end of the teaching sequence, all three teachers predicted the marks that their students would achieve on a summative test. The researcher then interviewed the other two teachers to ascertain the sources of their predictions. The quantitative analysis of the teachers' predictions has shown that they were capable of predicting the performance of the majority of their students within an accuracy margin of 10%. Furthermore, when used to allocate grades, the predictions of the most experienced teacher in the study discriminated between the students more sensitively than did the marks achieved on the summative test. Another finding of the study was that all participating teachers were most accurate in predicting the performance of the students who achieved the lowest 25% of the test marks. Furthermore, the recap sheets were found to be effective in supporting student learning. In summary, the findings of this study suggest that neither continuous formative assessment instruments nor an end of unit summative test are, by themselves, sufficient to generate an accurate report of a student's performance. The use of recap sheets and teacher predictions as described above was shown to be a minimally demanding way of increasing the accuracy of summative assessments for grading purposes, while providing great benefits to student learning.