In my past blog, we have covered the importance of developing/designing an Evidence Plan. For this blog, we will now cover the topic on Table of Specifications (ToS) and Writing your Written test.
The Plan Training Session-Competency Based Learning Material (PTS-CBLM) of the Trainers Methodology Level 1(TM-1) Training explains the Table of Specifications as,
"A table that shows what will be tested (taught) is the table of specifications. For our purpose of institutional evaluation, we shall be preparing a table of specifications for our written test.
This will help us plan how many items we need to prepare to cover all the contents or objectives that we need to assess based on the evidence plan you previously prepared.
A table of specifications is a two-way table that matches the objectives or content you have taught with the level at which you expect students to perform. It contains an estimate of the percentage of the test to be allocated to each topic at each level at which it is to be measured. In effect we have established how much emphasis to give to each objective or topic."
Aside from this, it also described that a ToS has three parts, these are:
- Objectives/Content/Topic – these are the content
- Levels of learning – your questions shall be divided into the levels of learning: knowledge, comprehension and application.
- Percentage/number of items
Sample Table of Specifications (TOS)
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| Figure 1. Sample TOS |
Figure 1 shows the different parts of the TOS as previously explained.
Developing a Table of Specifications
The question that we need to answer now, before we proceed is where do we get the topics that we will use to write our written test?
In part 1, I had mentioned that I will relate some of the covered topics in the development of an Evidence Plan with upcoming topics. Remember that one of the column that we need to place a check mark when we were developing our Evidence plan was written test.
The reason why we need to select which of the Performance Criteria requires a written test is because it can now serve as our guide in selecting the topics when writing our test questions.
To do this, all that we need to do is to look at our Evidence Plan and select all those criteria that we had checked to have a written test and copy them one by one to the "objectives/content area/topics" of our TOS.
After this, select the levels of learning that you wish to use for your questions and write the number of items per level of learning as shown in Figure 2.
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Figure 2. Accomplished TOS
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To fully understand the information on this sample TOS, you must refer to the previous sample Evidence Plan in my previous blog.
Looking at the sample, you will notice that the first topic that I had placed in this TOS Sample was the Performance Criteria that was marked as a critical aspect of this competency, worth noting too, is that this Criteria was also marked to be part of the written test which is the reason why this criteria was included in this TOS.
For this Criteria, two (2) knowledge and comprehension questions will be written totaling four items. which comprises 80% of all the questions.
Same is true with the next criteria which can also be found under the first Learning Outcome (LO). For this criteria only one question under Knowledge will be written, which is 20% of the total questions.
This is how we use the evidence plan for our TOS. we use it as our reference in determining the kind questions that we are to write for our written test. After this you can now start writing your written test based on the topics that you had selected.
In Summary and referring to the given example, the written test have a total of five (5) items, in which three (3) are knowledge and two (2) are comprehensions, 80% will come from the Criteria marked as critical aspect while 20% will come from the other criteria.
In my next Blog, I will be covering the proper way of developing Performance Test. Hope this simple tutorial helped. Should you have further questions, feel free to comment below.
Cheers!
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