Educational testing and validity of conclusions in the scholarship of teaching and learning

Am J Pharm Educ. 2013 Nov 12;77(9):186. doi: 10.5688/ajpe779186.

Abstract

Validity and its integral evidence of reliability are fundamentals for educational and psychological measurement, and standards of educational testing. Herein, we describe these standards of educational testing, along with their subtypes including internal consistency, inter-rater reliability, and inter-rater agreement. Next, related issues of measurement error and effect size are discussed. This article concludes with a call for future authors to improve reporting of psychometrics and practical significance with educational testing in the pharmacy education literature. By increasing the scientific rigor of educational research and reporting, the overall quality and meaningfulness of SoTL will be improved.

Keywords: educational testing; psychometrics; reliability; scholarship of teaching and learning; validity.

MeSH terms

  • Education, Pharmacy / organization & administration*
  • Education, Pharmacy / standards
  • Educational Measurement / methods*
  • Humans
  • Learning
  • Observer Variation
  • Psychometrics
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Teaching / organization & administration
  • Validation Studies as Topic