The Use of Subscores in Higher Education: When Is This Useful?

Rob R Meijer,Casper J Albers,Jorge N Tendeiro,Anja J Boevé,Roel J Bosker

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00305

Abstract

Assessment in higher education is challenging because teachers face more students, with less contact time as compared to primary and secondary education. Therefore, teachers and management are often interested in efficient ways of giving students diagnostic feedback and providing information on the basis of subscores is one method that is often used in large-scale standardized testing. In this article we discuss some recent psychometric literature that warns against the use of subscores in addition to the use of total scores. We illustrate how the added value of subscores can be evaluated using two college exams: A multiple choice exam and a combined open-ended question and multiple choice exam; these formats are often used in higher education and represent cases in which using subscores may be informative. We discuss the implications of our findings for future classroom evaluation.

Highlights

For teachers in higher education, student assessment through administering and scoring exams is a common and efficient method to test large groups of students. Cizek (2009) defined a test as “a systematic sample of a person’s knowledge, skill, or ability” and assessment as a much broader planned process of gathering such information for different purposes
Since the PRMSEx values are larger than the proportional reduction in mean squared error (PRMSE) values, we conclude that reporting subscores would not be useful in this case
Most researchers and practitioners realize that unreliable subscores should not be used, or should be used with great care, in many publications in educational and psychology studies we often read sentences like “The reliability of the total score equaled 0.80; whereas the reliability of subscore X equaled 0.60 and subscore Y equaled 0.55.”

Summary

Introduction

For teachers in higher education, student assessment through administering and scoring exams is a common and efficient method to test large groups of students. Cizek (2009) defined a test (or exam) as “a systematic sample of a person’s knowledge, skill, or ability” and assessment as a much broader planned process of gathering such information for different purposes. One way to provide feedback while keeping teacher burden low, is to report subscores, that is, to report the sum of item scores on a specified number of items, because it is assumed that these subscores may provide additional information to the total score on the exam. This idea is not new and there are many examples where subscores on exams or tests are used for diagnostic, formative, and remedial purposes (Ketterlin-Geller and Yovanoff, 2009; Schneider and Andrade, 2013; Harks et al, 2014). The total score on a reading comprehension test may be reported together with subscores that reflect specific reading skills, like being able to understand the meaning of a story as opposed to being able to read and understand individual sentences (Reckase and Xu, 2014)

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