Information approach to development of test materials
This article discusses the information approach to the development of test materials. The informational approach provides the use of terms and concepts of informatics. The approach in the article is the application of information theory to develop test materials with the aim of improving their quality. On the basis of information theory, test material should provide adequate display of educational material. The adequacy of measurement data is considered in three forms: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. Information adequacy forms define purpose, structure, form and content of test materials. There are some well-known measures of information that correspond to its form of adequacy: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. Syntactic measure of information measurement operates with general featureless information and only determines the amount of data in a test material. The semantic measure is used for measuring a sense content of information in pedagogical meter. The most-known is a thesaurus one. Pragmatic measure determines the usefulness of test information for defining level of trainees’ preparedness. The important feature in the development of test materials is the concept of quality of test information. As quality parameters are used: representativity, clarity, thoroughness, sufficiency and openness. On the basis of test information adequacy forms and parameters of quality basic requirements are formed which define the structure and content of the test materials.