A test battery or assessment battery is a set multiple psychometrically-distinct exams delivered in one administration.  In some cases, these are various tests that are cobbled together for related purposes, such as a psychologist testing a 8 year old child on their intelligence, anxiety, and autism spectrum.  However, in many cases it is a single test title that we often refer to as a single test but is actually several separate tests, like a university admissions test that has English, Math, and Logical Reasoning components.  Why do so? The key here is that we want to keep them psychometrically separate, but maximize the amount of information about the person to meet the purposes of the test.

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Examples of a Test Battery

Test batteries are used in a variety of fields, pretty much anywhere assessment is done.

Admissions and Placement Testing

The classic example is a university admissions test that has English, Math, and Logic portions.  These are separate tests, and psychometricians would calculate the reliability and other important statistics separately.  However, the scores are combined at the end to get an overall picture of examinee aptitude or achievement, and use that to maximally predict 4-graduation rates and other important criterion variables.

Why is is called a battery?  Because we are battering the poor student with not just one, but many exams!

Pre-Employment Testing

Exam batteries are often used in pre-employment testing.  You might get tested on computer skills, numerical reasoning, and noncognitive traits such as integrity or conscientiousness. These are used together to gain incremental validity.  A good example is the CAT-ASVAB, which is the selection test to get into the US Armed Forces.  There are 10 tests (vocabulary, math, mechanical aptitude…).

Psychological or Psychoeducational Assessment

In a clinical setting, clinicians will often use a battery of tests, such as IQ, autism, anxiety, and depression.  Some IQ tests themselves as a battery, as they might assess visual reasoning, logical reasoning, numerical reasoning, etc.  However, these have a positive manifold, meaning that they correlate quite highly with each other.  Another example is the Woodcock-Johnson.

K-12 Educational Assessment

Composite Scores

A Different Animal: Test with Sections

The battery is different than a single test that has distinct sections.  For example, a K12 English test might have 10 vocab items, 10 sentence-completion grammar items, and 2 essays.  Such tests are usually analyzed as a single test, as they are psychometrically unidimensional.

How to Deliver A Test Battery

In ASC’s platforms,  Assess.ai  and  FastTest, all this functionality is available out of the box: test batteries, composite scores, and sections within a test.  Moreover, they come with a lot of important functionality, such as separation of time limits, navigation controls, customizable score reporting, and more.  Click here to request a free account and start applying best practices.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have become buzzwords over the past few years.  As I already wrote about, they are actually old news in the field of psychometrics.   Factor analysis is a classical example of ML, and item response theory (IRT) also qualifies as ML.  Computerized adaptive testing (CAT) is actually an application of AI to psychometrics that dates back to the 1970s.

One thing that is very different about the world of AI/ML today is the massive power available in free platforms like R, Python, and TensorFlow.  I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few years about how these tools can impact the world of assessment.  A straightforward application is too automated essay scoring; a common way to approach that problem is through natural language processing with the “bag of words” model and utilize the document-term matrix (DTM) as predictors in a model for essay score as a criterion variable.  Surprisingly simple.  This got me to wondering where else we could apply that sort of modeling.  Obviously, student response data on selected-response items provides a ton of data, but the research questions are less clear.  So, I turned to the topic that I think has the next largest set of data and text: item banks.

Step 1: Text Mining

The first step was to explore tools for text mining in R.  I found this well-written and clear tutorial on the text2vec package and used that as my springboard.  Within minutes I was able to get a document term matrix, and in a few more minutes was able to prune it.  This DTM alone can provide useful info to an organization on their item bank, but I wanted to delve further.  Can the DTM predict item quality?

Step 2: Fit Models

To do this, I utilized both the caret and glmnet packages to fit models.  I love the caret package, but if you search the literature you’ll find it has a problem with sparse matrices, which is exactly what the DTM is.  One blog post I found said that anyone with a sparse matrix is pretty much stuck using glmnet.

I tried a few models on a small item bank of 500 items from a friend of mine, and my adjusted R squared for the prediction of IRT parameters (as an index of item quality) was 0.53 – meaning that I could account for more than half the variance of item quality just by knowing some of the common words in each item’s stem.  I wasn’t even using the answer texts n-grams, or additional information like Author and content domain.

Want to learn more about your item banks?

I’d love to swim even deeper on this issue.  If you have a large item bank and would like to work with me to analyze it so you can provide better feedback and direction to your item writers and test developers, drop me a message at solutions@assess.com!  This could directly impact the efficiency of your organization and the quality of your assessments.

One of the most cliche phrases associated with assessment is “teaching to the test.”  I’ve always hated this phrase, because it is only used in a derogatory matter, almost always by people who do not understand the basics of assessment and psychometrics.  I recently saw it mentioned in this article on PISA, and that was one time too many, especially since it was used in an oblique, vague, and unreferenced manner.

So, I’m going to come out and say something very unpopular: in most cases, TEACHING TO THE TEST IS A GOOD THING.

Why teaching to the test is usually a good thing

If the test reflects the curriculum – which any good test will – then someone who is teaching to the test will be teaching to the curriculum. Which, of course, is the entire goal of teaching. The phrase “teaching to the test” is used in an insulting sense, especially because the alliteration is resounding and sellable, but it’s really not a bad thing in most cases.  If a curriculum says that 4th graders should learn how to add and divide fractions, and the test evaluates this, what is the problem? Especially if it uses modern methodology like adaptive testing or tech-enhanced items to make the process more engaging and instructional, rather than oversimplifying to a text-only multiple choice question on paper bubble sheets?

The world of credentialing assessment, this is an extremely important link.  Credential tests start with a job analysis study, which surveys professionals to determine what they consider to be the most important and frequently used skills in the job.  This data is then transformed into test blueprints. Instructors for the profession, as well as aspiring students that are studying to pass the test, then focus on what is in the blueprints.  This, of course, still contains the skills that are most important and frequently used in the job!

So what is the problem then?

Now, telling teachers how to teach is more concerning, and more likely to be a bad thing.  Finland does well because it gives teachers lots of training and then power to choose how they teach, as noted in the PISA article.

As a counterexample, my high school math department made an edict starting my sophomore year that all teachers had to use the “Chicago Method.” It was pure bunk and based on the fact that students should be doing as much busy work as possible instead of the teachers actually teaching. I think it is because some salesman convinced the department head to make the switch so that they would buy a thousand brand new textbooks.  The method makes some decent points (here’s an article from, coincidentally, when I was a sophomore in high school) but I think we ended up with a bastardization of it, as the edict was primarily:

1. Assign students to read the next chapter in class (instead of teaching them!); go sit at your desk.
2. Assign students to do at least 30 homework questions overnight, and come back tomorrow with any questions they have.
3. Answer any questions, then assign them the next chapter to read.  Whatever you do, DO NOT teach them about the topic before they start doing the homework questions.  Go sit at your desk.

Isn’t that preposterous?  Unsurprisingly, after two years of this, I went from being a leader of the Math Team to someone who explicitly said “I am never taking Math again”.  And indeed, I managed to avoid all math during my senior year of high school and first year of college. Thankfully, I had incredible professors in my years at Luther College, leading to me loving math again, earning a math major, and applying to grad school in psychometrics.  This shows the effect that might happen with “telling teachers how to teach.” Or in this case, specifically – and bizarrely – to NOT teach.

What about all the bad tests out there?

Now, let’s get back to the assumption that a test does reflect a curriculum/blueprints.  There are, most certainly, plenty of cases where an assessment is not designed or built well.  That’s an entirely different problem, and is an entirely valid concern. I have seen a number of these in my career.  This danger why we have international standards on assessments, like AERA/APA/NCME and NCCA.  These provide guidelines on how a test should be build, sort of like how you need to build a house according to building code and not just throwing up some walls and a roof.

For example, there is nothing that is stopping me from identifying a career that has a lot of people looking to gain an edge over one another to get a better job… then buying a textbook, writing 50 questions in my basement, and throwing it up on a nice-looking website to sell as a professional certification.  I might sell it for $395, and if I get just 100 people to sign up, I’ve made $39,500!!!! This violates just about every NCCA guideline, though. If I wanted to get a stamp of approval that my certification was legit – as well as making it legally defensible – I would need to follow the NCCA guidelines.

My point here is that there are definitely bad tests out there, just like there are millions of other bad products in the world.  It’s a matter of caveat emptor. But just because you had some cheap furniture on college that broke right away, doesn’t mean you swear off on all furniture.  You stay away from bad furniture.

There’s also the problem of tests being misused, but again that’s not a problem with the test itself.  Certainly, someone making decisions is uninformed. It could actually be the best test in the world, with 100% precision, but if it is used for an invalid application then it’s still not a good situation.  For example, if you took a very well-made exam for high school graduation and started using it for employment decisions with adults. Psychometricians call this validity – that we have evidence to support the intended use of the test and interpretations of scores.  It is the #1 concern of assessment professionals, so if a test is being misused, it’s probably by someone without a background in assessment.

So where do we go from here?

Put it this way, if an overweight person is trying to become fitter, is success more likely to come from changing diet and exercise habits, or from complaining about their bathroom scale?  Complaining unspecifically about a high school graduation assessment is not going to improve education; let’s change how we educate our children to prepare them for that assessment, and ensure that the assessment reflects the goals of the education.  Nevertheless, of course, we need to invest in making the assessment as sound and fair as we can – which is exactly why I am in this career.