Abstract
Recent experience of test development in Ireland, a country which had no tradition of formal standardised testing, is drawn on, in order to highlight a number of practical and measurement problems that future test developers in other countries may experience. The paper focuses on a number of issues that have received relatively little attention in the literature. The practical problems which are examined include the identification of the objectives of the school curriculum, the production of test materials and the selection of appropriate samples of schools for standardisation purposes. The measurement or psychometric problems relate to curricular and statistical characteristics of individual test items, a test ceiling effect caused by some pupils answering all or almost all of the test items correctly and the lack of test sophistication among pupils and teachers. It is pointed out that a number of conventional procedures for developing norm-referenced measures of pupil attainment may prove somewhat less than successful in countries or educational systems with common curricula.
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