The Reliability of Teachers’ Judgement of the Abilities Being Tested by Multiple Choice Items

Summary Twenty‐two teachers were asked to give their opinion as to the ability being tested by each item in two multiple‐choice examination papers. Agreement appeared to be rather low, particularly from one of the papers, but a rigid statistical analysis was impossible because of the difficulty of deciding upon acceptable criteria. The opinions of the teachers were correlated with the facility values for the items and the coefficients obtained appear to support the Bloom taxonomy.