These modules were prepared by IIEP staff and consultants to be used in training workshops presented for the National Research Coordinators who are responsible for the educational policy research programme conducted by the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ). This module focuses on item writing for tests and examinations. Within the field of test development, the tasks and/or questions that are used to construct tests and examinations are referred to as ‘items’, and the range techniques involved in preparing those items are collectively referred to as ‘item writing’. Is item writing an art or a science? The best item development techniques combine elements of both these intellectual activities. On the one hand, there is a fair amount of experimental method, which we might recognize as scientific, incorporated within the whole set of procedures for developing a good item, or the sets of such things we call ‘tests’. However, as this document will make clear, writing a good item is also a highly creative act. By the end of the process something new, powerful, and useful has emerged – a test instrument which has used words, symbols or other materials from a curriculum or a syllabus in a new way, often to serve a variety of educational purposes.
