The Relationship of Achievement On a Teacher-Made Mathematics Test of Computational Skills To Two Ways of Recording Answers and To Two Workspace Arrangements

Abstract

The performance of one sample of 120 seventh-grade students and of one sample of 120 eighth-grade students on a 30-item teacher-made test of computational skills was related to (a) transcribing the item responses to numbered spaces in an answer column on a separate sheet vs. writing the item response on the test form itself and (b) providing workspace on the test form itself vs. not providing such space. From the use of a 2 × 2 quasi-experimental design, statistically significant differences were obtained with respect to both main effects (p < .05) for the sample of seventh-grade students and with respect to the single main effect of mode of recording item response (p < .001) for the sample of eighth-grade students. When the data were interrupted descriptively rather than inferentially there was the strong suggestion that recording answers directly on the examination form was associated with a higher average level of student performance than that realized when a detached answer column was used. For the sample of seventh-grade students, provision of working space on the test form was observed to yield higher average scores than when such a provision was not made.