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An Empirical Comparison of Three-and Four-Choice Items and Tests: Susceptibility to Testwiseness and Internal Consistency Reliability

University of Alberta

Dwight Harley

Edmonton Catholic Schools

Theoretical and test simulation work reveals that under the knowledge-or-randomguessing assumption, three-option item tests are at least as good as four-option item tests in terms of item discrimination and internal consistency. Of concern, however, is the finding that multiple-choice items may be susceptible to testwiseness, thereby contradicting the random-guessing assumption. Both item-level and test-level characteristics were examined for items included in a high stakes school-leaving mathematics examination. As expected, the influence of testwiseness is lessened when three-option items are used instead of four-option items. Differences and nondifferences between the psychometric characteristics of the three-option and four-option test forms tend to agree with the findings of earlier studies: Tests consisting of three-option items are at least equivalent to tests composed of four options in terms of internal consistency score reliability, difficulty is inversely related to the number of options, and the findings for item discrimination are not conclusive.

Educational and Psychological Measurement, Vol. 59, No. 2, 234-247 (1999)
DOI: 10.1177/00131649921969820


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