Report: Psychometrics and Quiz Essay

Project
Joanie Bergstrom
Argosy University
R7514
April 29, 2015
Dr. Elissa Litwin

Survey Purpose
The purpose of this survey is to learn the opinions of science students on how learning activities are structured. Specifically, the survey collects data on the opinions of surveys related to how feedback is provided and whether students feel that these activities should be included as part of their overall course grade.
Descriptive Item Analysis of the Specific Scales Measured
The results of the pretest focused on five survey questions (Q1, Q2, Q19, Q20, and Q21). Question 1 requested the gender of the respondent. Using SPSS the results showed that the participants were 60% female. Question 2 asked the age of the respondent. The survey results indicated that the Median age of the students is 33.80, which also closely aligned with the Mean. From the results this does follow a normal curve. Question 19 asked students their opinion on how important it was to know if they answered questions correctly after each response to a question. Students were asked to rate the importance using a 7-point likert scale with 1 indicating not very important and 7 indicating extremely important. The results of the survey indicate that all answers fell within the range of 3 to 7, with 40% of the respondents answering “7” on the scale, indicating that it was extremely important to know immediately after answering if the question was answered correctly. Question 20 asked students their opinion on how important it was to receive detailed feedback about their response after each response to a question beyond just knowing if the question was answered correctly. Again, students were asked to rate the importance using a 7-point likert scale with 1 indicating not very important and 7 indicating extremely important. The survey results showed that the range for answers received fell between 4 and 7. This seems to indicate that it is more important that just knowing the right answers but perhaps not as important as simply knowing one way or another that the question was answered correctly. For this question, 40% of the respondents answered 5 on the 7-point scale.
Question 21 asked students their opinion on how important it was to receive points on learning activities by once again rating the importance using at 7-point likert scale with 1 indicating not very important and 7 indicating extremely important. The survey results showed that answers ranged from 4 to 7 but that 80% of the respondents indicated 6 or 7 on the scale that receiving points for these activities was important.
Using the responses of five surveys five times doesn’t leave room for much variance but it does allow a review of how the questions are able to be converted from data to information as needed when developing reliable survey instruments (Alreck & Settles, 2004). Using SPSS a Summary of the Questions using a scale showed the reliability to be questionable.
Reliability Analysis
To test the reliability of the three questions that used the scale of 1 to 7 to rate the importance of two types of feedback and points assigned to the learning activities, SPSS was used to run a reliability analysis on these three variable. The results are listed below.

Reliability Statistics
Cronbach's Alpha
N of Items
.208
3

Item-Total Statistics

Scale Mean if Item Deleted
Scale Variance if Item Deleted
Corrected Item-Total Correlation
Cronbach's Alpha if Item Deleted
Importance of Feedback
11.40
1.917
.276
-.435a
Importance of Immediacy of feedback (after input rather than submision)
11.60
1.917
.839
-1.739a importance of earning points for Learning Activities/Quizzes
11.00
6.250
-.373
.907
a. The value is negative due to a negative average covariance among items. This violates reliability model assumptions. You may want to check item codings.

Scale Statistics
Mean
Variance
Std. Deviation
N of Items
17.00
5.417
2.327
3

This analysis suggests that there is something wrong with

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