EPAA/AAPE is a peer-reviewed, open-access, international, multilingual, and multidisciplinary journal designed for researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and development analysts concerned with education policies. EPAA/AAPE accepts unpublished original manuscripts in English, Spanish and Portuguese without restriction as to conceptual and methodological perspectives, time or place. EPAA/AAPE publishes issues comprised of empirical articles, commentaries, and special issues at roughly weekly intervals, all of which pertain to educational policy, with direct implications for educational policy.
Jay Parkes is an Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of New Mexico. He received his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the Pennsylvania State University in 1998 specializing in applied measurement and statistics. His research interests include generalizability in performance assessment and cognitive and motivational aspects of performance assessments.
Relationship Between Reliability and Cost of Performance Assessment
Jay Parkes
Abstract
Performance assessments have come upon two major roadblocks: low reliability coefficients and high cost. Recent speculation has posited that the two are directly related such that cost must rise in order to increase reliability. This understanding may be an oversimplification of the relationship. Two empirical demonstrations are offered to show that more than one combination of sources of error may result in a desired generalizability coefficient and that it is possible to increase the number of observations while also decreasing cost.
Keywords
Costs; Elementary School Students; Elementary Secondary Education; High School Students; Higher Education; Performance Based Assessment; Reliability; Test Results; Undergraduate Students