Chapter 4 Abstract

 

This chapter is the second part of the story about designing items. The chapter concentrates on how to categorize the item responses and then score them to be indicators of the construct. It introduces the idea of an “outcome space,” which describes how to categorize the responses. Some important qualities that the categories should possess are that they should be: well-defined, finite and exhaustive, ordered, context-specific and research-based. In addition, the categories need to be scored in order to use them in the Wright map—the topic of the next chapter. The chapter concludes with a description of three widely applicable strategies for jointly developing the outcome space and scoring strategy: phenomenography, the structure of the learning outcome (SOLO) technique and Guttman items.