Date of Award:

5-1975

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department:

School of Teacher Education and Leadership

Department name when degree awarded

Elementary Education

Committee Chair(s)

Bryce E. Adkins

Committee

Bryce E. Adkins

Abstract

Purpose and Procedures

The purpose of this paper was to construct and validate an instrument which could effectively identify students enrolled in the elementary teacher training program at Utah State University whose mathematical competency equals or exceeds the standard for completion of the required math content courses prior to taking those courses. It was the hope of the writer that such students would be allowed to waive those courses and substitute courses representing areas of greater need for the individual student.

Care was taken in the construction and validation of the instrument to assure content validity with college-level texts designed for such courses and elementary texts which the teacher is expected to use in the teaching situation.

Preliminary forms of the instrument constructed in the study were administered to pilot groups. An item analysis was performed to determine the level of difficulty and discriminating power of individual test items as well as the ability of the distractors to distract. The final form consisted of 58 multiple-choice test items.

Results

Using Kuder-Richardson reliability formula number 20, the reliability coefficient of the instrument was .87, which indicates a high level of reliability for a screening test. The variance was 82.72, resulting in a standard deviation of 9.10.

Correlating the test results, when used as a pretest in the above-mentioned courses, with final grades in the course resulted in a correlation coefficient which was significant at the .01 level of significance, indicating high predictive validity of the instrument with actual success in the course.

Checksum

926efc31ef7a738af5959794d3c79c8b

Download

Share

COinS

Copyright for this work is retained by the student. If you have any questions regarding the inclusion of this work in the Digital Commons, please email us at .