| Abstract: | Noting the desirability of the current shift toward mastery testing and criterion-referenced test procedures, an evaluation model is presented which should be useful and practical for such purposes. This model is based on the assumptions that the learning of fundamental skills can be considered all or none, that each item response on a single skill test represents an unbiased sample of the examinee's true mastery status, that measurement error occurring on the test (as estimated from the average interitem correlation) can be of only one type (α or β) for each examinee, and that through practical and theoretical considerations of evaluation error costs and item error characteristics, an optimal mastery criterion can be calculated. Each of these assumptions is discussed and the resultant mastery criteria algorithm is described along with an example from the IPI math program. |
