17  Good measurement | A-F

We would like you to think a bit more about what good measurement constitutes and how reliability and validity are related to good measurement. For this reason, we would like you to complete the below activities from Chapter 5 in Beth’s book.

Please submit your answers as a Word (.docx) document under the “Quizzes and Assignments” section on the Moodle page for the labs. You can complete the assignment on your own, as a pair or as a small group. If more than one person contributed, please submit only one document and add the names of everyone who contributed to the document.

The assignment submission link is labelled “Good measurement activity”. The deadline for submission is Thursday, 24 October, 3pm. This assignment will not contribute to your overall mark. Formative assignments not submitted by the deadline incur no penalty. Please note that you will not receive individual feedback on your submissions, but we will provide you with model answers and we will highlight some issues frequently observed with this assignment.

Activity 1

Educational psychologists use teacher ratings of classroom shyness (on a nine-point scale, where 1 = “not at all shy in class” and 9 = “very shy in class”) to measure children’s temperament. Indicate which kinds of reliability would need to be evaluated. Then, draw a scatterplot indicating that the measure has good reliability and another one indicating the measure has poor reliability.

Activity 2

Consider how you might validate the nine-point classroom shyness rating scale.

  • First, what behaviours might be relevant for establishing this rating’s criterion validity? Draw a scatterplot showing the results of a study in which the classroom shyness rating has good criterion validity.
  • Second, come up with ways to evaluate the convergent and discriminant validity of this rating system. What traits should correlate strongly with shyness? What traits should correlate only weakly or not at all? Explain why you chose those traits. Draw a scatterplot showing good convergent validity and a scatterplot showing good discriminant validity.

Please take pictures of all of your drawings and add these to your Word document (alternatively, you may use Excel or other software to create your visualisations).

Feedback

Please download the file below to read the feedback on this assignment. Note that the file also includes model answers.