What makes a good assessment? A good assessment is a valid assessment as well as a fair assessment. While test developers and psychometricians have different methods of constructing testing instruments, method bias is always something that you should plan to try to balance out. This is especially true of adapted assessments, where original testing instruments are adapted for new linguistic and/or cultural audiences.

Method bias is a term that refers to the problems resulting from the way that an assessment is administered, the incomparability of the samples used and the inequality produced by the specific instrument’s characteristics.

In this blog post we will focus on two types of method bias: administration bias and instrument bias. However, rest assured that we will dedicate an entire post to the third type of method bias – sample bias – in the near future.

Instrument Bias

There are many reasons that test preparation is a multi-billion dollar industry. For starters, these companies know that the more familiar someone is with a test’s format (stimulus familiarity, anyone?), the more likely that person is to do well on that test. But what about on a macro level? That’s where instrument bias comes in.

Instrument bias concerns the advantages or disadvantages that a particular test holds for a target linguistic and/or cultural group. As one example, how well do you think two testing groups would do on a computer-administered assessment when the first group is composed of digital natives and the second group has never used a computer before? As a second example, how well do you think two testing groups would do on an assessment that asks them to identify different situations from a series of photographs when the first group sees their daily culture reflected and the second group sees things they’ve never even heard described before?

Instrument bias provides either a helping hand or an unwelcome tax when an equal playing field should be provided instead. In content as well as in format, assessments should be adapted to test what they set out to test, and no more.

Administration Bias

Have you ever worked in an office that was absolutely freezing cold or sweltering hot? If you weren’t prepared for it, then you might have spent more time thinking about how uncomfortable you were and not working as productively as if had you been working in an optimal environment. Now what if you were taking a test? Would you perform as well as you normally would if you were shivering or sweating profusely? While thermostat use may be beyond the scope of most test adaptations, there are still many factors leading to administration bias that we can control for.

Administration bias refers to the effects caused by varying or unexpectedly adverse test administration conditions. These conditions could be social, physical or technical. For example, vague test administration instructions might prompt one exam proctor to interpret the instructions one way for his group of test takers, while another exam proctor might interpret the instructions in a completely different way for her group of test takers. This could have devastating effects on different groups of exam scores.

It’s important to consider all aspects of an assessment, including how it will be administered.

Test Adaptation Experts

Responsive Translation provides translation, adaptation, validation and other foreign-language services in more than 200 languages and dialects. We specialize in high-stakes projects and serving compliance-intensive industries, such as education, health care and law.

If you’d like to find out more about our services and our more than two decades of experience, please get in touch at 646-847-3309 or [email protected].

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