Community College Strategies: The Back Translation--A Good Practice in Instrument Selection

Jossey Bass. Available from John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774. Tel: 800-825-7550; Tel: 201-748-6645; Fax: 201-748-6021; e-mail: subinfo@wiley.com; Web site: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jhome/86511121

Y

2

Community Colleges; Content Validity; Item Analysis; College Faculty; Evaluation Methods; Higher Education; Educational Objectives; Student Evaluation; Evaluation Research

1041-6099

When a college or university needs an assessment instrument, it has two choices: select an existing instrument or develop a new one. Since the cost of instrument development in both time and human resources is often prohibitive, many assessment programs rely on existing instruments. The challenge then becomes choosing one that provides the best fit with the institution's learning objectives. When reviewing an instrument for possible selection, conducting a back translation (Smith and Kendall, 1963; Dawis, 1987) provides considerable information about the match between the items on the instrument and the learning objectives. The back translation process examines the content validity of an instrument by mapping individual items back to curricular objectives. This article discusses the back translation process and describes how math and science faculty members from the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) conducted the back translation exercise as part of the Summer 2003 VCCS Faculty Institute on Quantitative and Scientific Reasoning.

ERIC

2

2008

EJ790767