Effects Of Item Order Research Articles

Implications for Altering the Context in Which Test Items Appear: A Historical Perspective on an Immediate Concern

Research into the effects of item arrangement has been motivated by the need to know the potential effects on item statistics of different item arrangement schemes. This review of the literature confirms that many of the salient and common features of the research can be identified as a function of the practical psychometric concerns of the time. The studies are separated into three periods. The earliest studies investigated the simple main effect of item order on test performance; the late 1960s reflected a change in emphasis to a design that included interactions between item order and factors of examinees’ psychological and biological characteristics; current concern with test disclosure and development of individual adaptive testing instruments has shifted the emphasis to the effects of item order on the stability of item parameters. The literature has produced evidence of context effects, but has not demonstrated that the effects are so strong as to invalidate test theory or practice that is dependent on an assumption of item parameter invariance.

Effects of Item Order on Achievement Test Scores and Students’ Perception of Test Difficulty

Effects of Item Order on Achievement Test Scores and Students’ Perception of Test Difficulty

Effects of Item Order on the Perceived Seriousness of Crime: A Reexamination

This article examines the effects of item order on the perceived seriousness of crime. Previous research that addressed this question rotated only one offense to three locations on a questionnaire and concluded that item order had no effect. This research rotates several offenses, including violent, property, white-collar, and morals offenses. The perceived seriousness of an item was hypothesized to shift toward the severity of the preceding offense. The results substantiate this effect. In fact, item order was found to explain approximately the same amount of variation in the perceived seriousness of an offense as did respondents' demographic characteristics.

The Effects of Item Order on Test Performance and Stress

The objectives were to investigate the effect of item order on the performance of a mathematics test; on the amount of stress generated during a test; and on the performance of high and low test anxious Ss. Our major findings were, that the mean number of correct answers for test questions arranged in the difficult-to-easy order was significantly lower than the mean number of test questions arranged in the reverse order; and that item order had an effect on the stress generated during the test. The importance of this study to test constructors seems to be the evidence it provides against the practice of making the order of presentation of items in a test different for different examinees to reduce the chance of cheating.

Effects of Item Context and Order on Personality Ratings

Effects of Item Context and Order on Personality Ratings

The effect of instructions and item order on the arithmetic subtest of the Wechsler-Bellevue.

The effect of instructions and item order on the arithmetic subtest of the Wechsler-Bellevue.