A five-day workshop for subject leads of the Colleges of Education on test item construction has been opened in Kumasi.

The workshop organized by the Institute for Teacher Education and Continuing Professional Development (ITECPD) of the University of Education, Winneba (UEW), has 38 tutors drawn from the 15 Colleges of Education affiliated to UEW attending the workshop.

The workshop is aimed at guiding participants to construct and write test items for year one, semester 2 courses. The test item construction in alignment with relevant policies such as National Teachers' Standards (NTS), National Teacher Education Curriculum Framework (NTECF) and the National Teacher Education Assessment Policy (NTEAP).

Speaking at the opening, Director of the institute, Prof. George Dandy Dampson, reiterated that the core mandate of ITECPD is to mentor, guide, coach and nurture the 15 Colleges of Education affiliated to UEW.

He said the workshop was to develop basic skills in the test item construction in order to develop a standardized assessment framework for assessing students.

He stated: "We need to remember that teaching and learning process ends only when we are able to assess and grade our students."

He urged the facilitators and participants to be guided by NTEAP 7 guidelines, which bother on the Cognitive complexity, Content quality, Meaningfulness, Language Appropriateness, Transfer and generalizability, Fairness and Reliability.

He lamented that recent observations called for the need to devise a very simple, yet effective, pragmatic and purposeful mechanism to develop test items for students.

"The new mechanism developed and to be implemented by ITECPD includes that all tutors are mandated to set both objectives, multiple-choice, Easy type questions and forward same to ITECPD”, Prof. Dandy Dampson intimated.

He entreated participants to develop standardized framework and format of assessment specifically for test items that will address the competencies enshrined in the new curriculum.