Premium
THE SYMMETRY OF GENERALIZABILITY THEORY: APPLICATIONS TO EDUCATIONAL MEASUREMENT
Author(s) -
CARDINET JEAN,
TOURNEUR WAN,
ALLAL LINDA
Publication year - 1976
Publication title -
journal of educational measurement
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.917
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1745-3984
pISSN - 0022-0655
DOI - 10.1111/j.1745-3984.1976.tb00003.x
Subject(s) - generalizability theory , curriculum , documentation , library science , psychology , sociology , mathematics education , computer science , pedagogy , developmental psychology , programming language
Generalizability theory, as developed by Cronbach, Gleser, Nanda and Rajaratnam (1972), offers a more comprehensive and coherent framework than classical psychometric theory for the study of educational and psychological measurement. Nevertheless, these authors retain, at least in the examples they present, the traditional preoccupation of psychometrics, i.e., achieving the best possible differentiation of the persons tested. We would like to show that such a limitation is unnecessary and that generalizability theory provides a powerful descriptive and analytic tool for other kinds of problems, where persons are not the central object of study. Curriculum evaluation, in particular, implies differentiation of educational objectives, of learning situations, of stages of progress, etc.. In these cases, the between-subjects variability is more detrimental than helpful to the clarity of the results. When research focuses on the conditions of measurement rather than on persons measured, it becomes necessary to transpose the dimensions of the measurement design so as to differentiate conditions while generalizing over persons. In order to clarify the way in which the dimensions of a design need to be treated, depending on the measurement problem under study, some new concepts must be introduced, in particular, the notions of face of differentiation and face of generalization as complementary aspects of a measurement design. After introducing these concepts, an example will be presented, in order to show how the tools of generalizability theory may be extended to deal with a wide variety of measurement questions. Although implicit in the model of Cronbach, these extensions are not customary and can profitably be presented as suggestions for further research.