Technical Report - International Military Testing Association

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Item Validity Informetion ee a
Beeie for Teet Rtvisim.
VERN W. URRY and EDWXN C . S’RIIKEY
US Amy Enlisted Evaluation Center
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Xort of ue would pro’bmbly agree thet ~concepte such 88 tee; reli- .
ability and content validity are important chuecteriotice of teote
which ut ueed to evaluate ability or knowledge of -human befngm. All
too often, hovever, there concepte are over-eanphaaized at the axpenee
of a tart characterietic which ir coneiderably more fmportmt.
A teet mey be perftc,tly reliable, yet mi&w~be measuring entirely
nonvalid varianct, i,,e., it could bt measuring the wrong thing but
doing it in e beautifully perftct vey. Content validity, very important
for obvioue reaaose, ie occaei~nelly viewed by layum a8 the only kind
of toet velidity that ie rtquirtd in Order to 18bel � ttet ne being 8
good ant. Now the abrurdity of this point of view become8 mert apparent
when one tnalyxtr the types of dtciefone that era going to be rnadt ebout
tnlitttd men on the beet8 of their tart tcortt. Hart of the dtcieione
are bared upon.an important aeeumption. The aeeumptioo made is that
those individual8 vho acore high on the teat are performing better on
the job (end thue should be rewarded), and those rcoring losrtr on tht
teat art accordingly poortur perfonnere on the job (and hence ehould not
bt rewarded). Whether th:Lo ir a true asrumptLon should not be left to
cr:etal-bell garing or “ermchair” peychology, but � hould be subjected to
verification. Thir vtrificetion mey be referred to as eetablishing the
dtgrte of azpirical validity of a test, 1.6.. hw do ttst score8 actually
related to en external mtesurt of on the .job pcrfonnenca? Ut et the
Depertment of the Army ham rectrtly ‘incorporated e plen of v8lldetion
for both the eveluetion taete ana the C-der’e Eviluetion Report.
Detail8 of theta validation procedurea will be diecursed in mother paper.
The purpose of thie paper io to describe � sptcific facet of the etudy
which we cell tht “preliminary validity report.”
The prtlimfnary velidity report ir Intended primsrily for the u8e
of tt8t rpecialisto in the Test kvelopmunt Branch of the US Arm9
tnlieted Evrluation Center. The purpore of the rtport is to provide
guidelines in ttrt rtvieion bared on pertinent � tatfetic~l date which ie
not aV8ilAble from our reguler ���� � rulyeie etetirticr. Thfr prtrtnt
validation policy reprerente an improvement ovtr prevloue velidation
offortr in that validity data covering the entire ttrt outline and
indivfdurl test iteuu can be provided prior to teat rtvieion to allow
fat their uee in the decirioa mrklng process of tort dtvelopocnt.
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