VALIDITY

1) What is validity? - a test's usefulness

2) When is a test valid? - when it measures what it is intended to measure
3) What are the methods establishing validity? - content validity, construct validity, and criterion-related
validity
4) To what extent does a test have content validity? - it samples the content or behavior domain that it is
designed to measure
5) What type of test are content validity most associated with? - achievement-type tests
6) How is content validity built into a test? - involves clearly identifying the content or behavior domain to
be sampled and then writing or selecting items that represent that domain
7) Who is responsible for judging the content validity? - the subject matter experts
8) How can you tell that a test has adequate content validity? - the coefficient of internal consistency will
be large
9) What is face validity? - Whether or not a test looks like it measures what it is intended to measure
10) When is a test considered to have construct validity? - when it has been found to measure the
construct it is intended to measure
11) What is a construct? - an abstract characteristic that cannot be observed directly but can only be
inferred by observing its effects
12) What else is considered a construct? - hypothetical trait
13) What is convergent validity? - high correlations with measures of the same trait
14) What is discriminant or divergent validity? - low correlations with measures of unrelated
characteristics
15) What are examples of ambiguous constructs? - knowledge, love, or justice
16) What is factor analysis? - Conducted to identify the minimum number of common factors required to
account for the intercorrelations among a set of tests, subtests, or test items
17) When is a test considered to have construct factorial validity? - when it has high correlations with the
factors it would not be expected to correlate with
18) What do common factors do in factor analysis? - create either subtests or test items
19) What is criterion-related validity? - Test scores are to be used to draw conclusions about a subject's
performance on another measure
20) When is criterion-related validity confirmed? - when the criterion-related validity coefficient is large
21) What is concurrent validity? - when the criterion data are collected prior to or about the same time as
data on the predictor
22) What is predictive validity? - when the criterion is measured some time after the predictor has been
administered
1) TEST - a measurement device or technique used to quantify behavior or aid in the understanding and
prediction of behavior.
2) individual test - test that can only be given to one person at a time.
3) Achievement - refers to previous learning
4) aptitude - refers to the potential for learning or acquiring a specific skill.
5) intelligence - refers to a person's general potential to solve problems, adapt to changing circumstances,
think abstractly, and profit from experience.
6) personality test - test that measures overt and covert dispositions of individuals (the tendency that
individuals will show a particular behavior or reponse in any given situation) measures typical human
behavior.
7) structured personality test - Tests that provide a statement usually of the self-reported variety and
require the subject to choose between two or more alternative responses.
8) psychological test - a device for measuring characteristics of human beings that pertain to overt
(observable) and covert (intraindividual) behavior. Measures past, present, or future human behavior.
9) psychological testing - the use of psychological test. refers to all of the possible uses, applications, and
underlying concepts of psychological tests.
10) psychological measurement - a process of understanding and helping people cope with problems in
which tests are used to help collect meaningful information about the person and his or her
environment.
11) inferences - Logical deductions about events that cannot be observed directly.
12) frequency distribution - the systematic arrangement of scores on a measure to reflect how frequently
each value on the measure occurred.
13) distribution - summarizes the scored for a group of individuals.
14) percentile rank - the proportion of scores that fall below a particular score.
15) standard deviation - the square root of the average deviation around the mean (or the variance). it is
used as a measure of variability in a distribution of scores.
16) norms - a summary of the performance of a group of individuals on which a test was standardized.
usually includes the mean and the std dev. for the reference group and information on how to
translate a raw score into a percentile rank.
17) norm-referenced test - a test that evaluates each individual relative to a normative group.
18) criterion referenced test - a test that describes the specific types of skills, tasks, or knowledge of an
individual relative to a well-defined mastery criterion. it is limited to certain well-defined objectives.
19) scatter diagram - a picture of the relationship between two variables. for each individual, a pair of
observations is obtained, and the values are plotted in a two-dimensional space created by x and y.
20) CORRELATION - a mathematical description of whether or not two variables covary.
21) Correlation coefficient - a mathematical index used to describe the direction and the magnitude of a
relationship between two variables. Ranges between -1.0 and 1.0
22) regression - used to make predictions about scores on one variable from knowledge of scores on
another variable.
23) regression line - the best-fitting straight line through a set of points in a scatter diagram.
24) likert format - a format for attitude scale items in which subjects indicate their degree of agreement to
statements using these categories: strong disagree, disagree, neither disagree or agree, agree , strongly
agree.
25) category format - a rating scale format that often uses the categories 1 to 10.
26) item difficulty - a form of item analysis used to assess how difficult items are the most common index
of difficulty is the percentage of test takers who respond with the correct choice.