What does validity mean in assessment

Additionally, the sample population used for test development should be appropriately representative of the population as a whole that may use the assessment. Next, you can check guardrails for reliability that your potential vendors have put in place by asking:.

The assessment you choose should also come with detailed instructions that decrease any variations in testing conditions as much as possible, from time given for test-taking to noise levels in the testing environment. From cognitive ability tests to personality tests to emotional intelligence tests, any pre-employment assessment needs to measure what it intends to measure and produce consistent results over time to be useful to you and your company.

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Self Service Apps. Chapter 3: Understanding Test Quality-Concepts of Reliability and Validity Test reliability and validity are two technical properties of a test that indicate the quality and usefulness of the test.

These are the two most important features of a test. You should examine these features when evaluating the suitability of the test for your use. This chapter provides a simplified explanation of these two complex ideas. These explanations will help you to understand reliability and validity information reported in test manuals and reviews and use that information to evaluate the suitability of a test for your use.

What makes a good test? An employment test is considered "good" if the following can be said about it: The test measures what it claims to measure consistently or reliably. This means that if a person were to take the test again, the person would get a similar test score. The test measures what it claims to measure. For example, a test of mental ability does in fact measure mental ability, and not some other characteristic. The test is job-relevant.

In other words, the test measures one or more characteristics that are important to the job. By using the test, more effective employment decisions can be made about individuals. Each of these different reasons for testing represents a different test purpose. The purpose of the test determines the type of test you're going to produce, which in turn affects the kinds of tasks you're going to choose, the number of test items, the length of the test, and so on.

For example, a test certifying that doctors can practise in an English-speaking country would be different from a placement test which aims to place those doctors into language courses. Is it primary school children or teenagers or adults? Or is it airline pilots or doctors or engineers? This is an important question because the test has to be appropriate for the test takers it is aimed for.

If your test takers are primary school children, for instance, you might want to give them more interactive tasks or games to test their language ability. If you are testing listening skills, for example, you might want to use role plays for doctors, but lectures or monologues with university students. Another key point is to consider what you want to test.

Some examples of constructs are: intelligence, personality, anxiety, English language ability, pronunciation. To take language assessment as an example, the test construct could be communicative language ability, or speaking ability, or perhaps even a construct as specific as pronunciation. The focus here is on selecting the right test tasks for the ability i. The tasks in a test are like a menu of options that are available to choose from, and you must be sure to choose the right task or the right range of tasks for the ability you're trying to measure.

A test needs to be reliable and to produce accurate scores. The final — and in many ways most important — question to ask yourself is how the test is benefitting learners. Good tests engage learners in situations similar to ones that they might face outside the classroom i.