A CROSS‐VALIDATION STUDY OF THE ITEM ORDERING OF THE PEABODY PICTURE VOCABULARY TEST¹

Abstract

A subset of the items of both forms of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) was administered to a sample of 452 fourth‐, fifth‐ and sixth‐grade students. This sample of students was randomly divided into two equal subgroups. Item difficulty indices were calculated for each of the two subsamples for each of the two forms of the test. Data obtained from the first subsample were used to evaluate the published ordering of items of Forms A and B of the PPVT and to reorder the items according to the empirically derived item difficulties. The second subsample was used as a cross‐validation sample to evaluate the empirically derived reordering of items. The results of the cross‐validation of the reordering indicate a substantial and significant increase in the validity of the item orderings for this subset of items on both forms of the PPVT. Therefore, this new ordering may yield a more accurate estimate of the intelligence of average and above students in the fourth‐, fifth‐, and sixth‐grades than the present, published ordering of items.

Adapting a receptive vocabulary test for preschool‐aged Greek‐speaking children

“…Also, after words are chosen, adaptation typically means reordering the items in the adapted test, since relative item difficulty may differ for even very good translation equivalents (Roca, 1955; Renzulli & Paulus, 1969). As Clark noted (Clark, 1965, cited in Simon & Joiner, 1976) when developing an adapted version of a Spanish test in Portuguese, test equivalence was achieved by matching item reliability and item difficulty, and then by aiming for a good match in the graded relative order of items across the two tests.…”