The DOI matches its Crossref record; 42 of the 42 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
How to Construct Achievement Tests to Assess Comprehension
Abstract
The thesis of this paper is that educational research workers have not yet learned how to develop tests that meet the primitive first requirement for a system of measurement, namely that there is a clear and consistent definition of the things being counted. By achievement I mean a set of questions asked to ascertain what a person has learned from exposure to instruction. There will be in the following a tacit restriction to paper-and-pencil test questions expressed in a natural language, though much of the discussion can be interpreted more broadly. The purpose of this paper is to propose the distinctions necessary to determine whether a person has comprehended an instructional communication, to outline procedures for constructing test questions based on these distinctions, and to show that test questions derived according to the procedures give rise to orderly, sensible data. The starting point for the analysis will be the now-classic Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Bloom, et al, 1956), and I shall rely on the important recent work of Bormuth (1970) and Hively (1970). Finally, a number of articles in the recent literature will be reviewed to determine how investigators currently construct tests and what they report about these tests.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Ambrose, A., Wittgenstein, L., & Anscombe, G. E. M. (1954) · Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · doi:10.2307/2103745 · Cited by 12,192
Human Memory: A Proposed System and its Control Processes
Atkinson, R. C., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1968) · Psychology of Learning and Motivation · doi:10.1016/s0079-7421(08)60422-3 · Cited by 7,216
The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives
(2012) · Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning · doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6_6027 · Cited by 4,103
Retrieval time from semantic memory
Collins, A. M., & Quillian, M. R. (1969) · Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior · doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(69)80069-1 · Cited by 3,109
Gagné, R. M. (1965) · Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (Québec government) · Cited by 3,016
Journal on Educational Psychology
Winston, J., Mandernach, J., Winsor, D. L., Sinnott, J. D., & Gujjar, A. A. (2014) · Cited by 2,947
Taxonomy of educational objectives
(2014) · Encyclopedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy · doi:10.4135/9781483346229.n326 · Cited by 2,480
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Treisman, A. M., & Geffen, G. (2012) · From Perception to Consciousness · doi:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199734337.003.0007 · Cited by 1,649
Mental imagery in associative learning and memory.
Paivio, A. (1969) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/h0027272 · Cited by 1,358
Berne, E. (1964) · Cited by 908
Cited by
Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment
Biggs, J. (1996) · Higher Education · doi:10.1007/bf00138871 · Cited by 4,084
Use of Top-Level Structure in Text: Key for Reading Comprehension of Ninth-Grade Students
Meyer, B. J. F., Brandt, D. M., & Bluth, G. J. (1980) · Reading Research Quarterly · doi:10.2307/747349 · Cited by 699
The standard problem: Meaning and values in measurement and evaluation.
Messick, S. (1975) · American Psychologist · doi:10.1037/0003-066x.30.10.955 · Cited by 417
Comparing comprehension measured by multiple-choice and open-ended questions.
Ozuru, Y., Briner, S., Kurby, C. A., & McNamara, D. S. (2013) · Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale · doi:10.1037/a0032918 · Cited by 134
A study of fonts designed for screen display
Boyarski, D., Neuwirth, C., Forlizzi, J., & Regli, S. H. (1998) · Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '98 · doi:10.1145/274644.274658 · Cited by 120
Metadata
- Authors
- Anderson, R. C.
- Venue
- Review of Educational Research
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1972
- Volume
- 42
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 145
- ISSN
- 0034-6543 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2128126480
- Cited by
- 294
- References
- 42
- FWCI
- 234.17
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: How to Construct Achievement Tests to Assess Comprehension. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/1170014
- The paper
- Anderson, R. C. (1972). How to Construct Achievement Tests to Assess Comprehension. Review of Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.2307/1170014
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
