THE QUICK WORD TEST (QWT) was originally developed as an efficient instrument for assessment of verbal ability in the general and high school pop ulations (Level I) and in the college and profession al populations (Level II). Extensive data have been published on the reliability and on the content and pre dictive validity of this test (1). In using the QWT as a standard reference point in studies of vocational high school students, it was found that assuming the performance level of the students to be from one to three years retarded (based on other tests), the QWT was operating efficiently at levels equivalent to those of the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades (2). Persistent requests for a form that would go even below this level led to the development of the E le rn entary Forms as described below. One of the difficulties associated with using the QWT, Level I, with students below the seventh grade is that they have low a success rate unless they are very good students, anda morale factor could arise in the use of the test. In addition, the QWT is a power test, and verbal ability tends to be negative ly correlated to the amount of time required for completion of the test. Thus, while the QWT may be completed in about eight or ten minutes by a high proportion of high school students, sixth graders take much longer, pondering on the items, and the test becomes anything but quick. As a first approximation to the development of an Elementary Form, two forms were constructed from items selected tobe the easiest among those in the four alternate forms of the Level I QW T ' s . The initial selection was based on the original diffi culties of the items, on which basis the tests were first constructed in 19560 The difficulties were then checked against experience with tenth graders in the samples used for the norming of the QWT. Further, item-to-total correlations in the latter were checked and used as a basis for additional screening of items to increase efficiency of the test, since the length projected would be 50 items instead of 100. At this point it became evident that an insufficient number of items of the desired efficiency and difficulty existed in order to prepare forms having the ideal character istics specified in advance. Our rough extrapola tions indicated that we might not have a sufficient number of items that fourth graderswould be an swering correctly. Thus additional items were in troduced that had been utilized in our original devel opment of the QWT and had previously been dis carded as too easy. Only limited information about these items was available. Since our intention was to develop two forms, and less than 100 items were available on which we had confirmed informa tion on difficulty of the item and item-to-total corre lations, it was decided that in our first use of the forms 60 items would be utilized with the objective of reduction of the items to the 50 best items. The preliminary forms were constructed by roughly balancing the difficulties of 12 blocks of five items each. The first ten blocks were constructed to represent the final 50 item test as projected, and the additional two blocks were to serve as sources of substitute items.
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Aug 1, 1990
A.T Balou + 1
Open Access
