Item banking, on-demand and adaptive testing
Since around 2004, there has been a greatly increased emphasis on “personalisation” in UK education – tailoring the education experience to ensure that every learner reaches the highest standards possible. This involves changes to teaching and learning, and to formative assessment, but it also means ensuring that qualifications are flexible and responsive to the needs of learners. One aspect of this is providing assessments at a time to suit the candidate, rather than at fixed times of the year. While GCSEs and A levels continue to follow the twice yearly model, within vocational settings there has been a major move to offering tests “on-demand”. This necessarily involves providing different assessment content to candidates on different occasions and generally leads Awarding Organisations toward establishing a bank of test questions from which tests are assembled rather than writing new tests for each occasion.
The use of item banks for test creation, with the associated rules for item selection, and subsequent performance management of tests to demonstrate that all candidates were offered a fair test, irrespective of the test occasion, requires specialist performance management activities. It also places a different set of requirements on assessment writing and quality assurance processes.
Item banks can also be used to create adaptive tests. These are assessments in which each subsequest question is selected depending on the candidate's performance on the previous question(s). Adaptive tests can be used effectively in a number of areas:
- to measure skills across a very broad range without requiring candidates to attempt many items that are far too easy or hard for them
- to speed up the assessment process (in some circumstances adaptive tests can reach a reliable view of a candidate’s ability in around half the time of a traditional test)
- to keep candidates engaged and interested by presenting items with just the right amount of challenge.
AlphaPlus has worked extensively with item banks, on-demand test assembly and adaptive testing.
Clients
- For UK government clients, we produced the Tools Library – a range of around 50 adapative test tools for assessing Skills for Life (Literacy, Numeracy and ESOL)
- We have also produced versions of these assessment for use in specific sectors, for example, within the UK Health Sector.
- We assemble and quality assure balanced test sets for the Driving Standards Agency Driving Theory Tests from large item banks
- We provide advice on item bank implementation for major UK vocational Awarding Organisations.
