T Benefits of Teachers ’ Feedback to Reverse - Engineering Item Language Test Specifications from an Existing Item Bank

The following paper reports the results in the development of the Oregon English Language Proficiency Assessment where no item test specifications were used to create test items. However, based on the feedback from ELL educators in their analysis of item formats, a specific context to create item test specifications (presumably reverseengineering) is provided to compensate for this gap. The article highlights the importance of teachers’ content decisions in supplementing statistical information for test construction in large scale assessment. Therefore, this paper concerns a systematic procedure carried out by a group of teachers evaluating several item formats from an item bank to select the most suitable ones in their relationship with the construct of the test to create item test specifications. The article only reports on the modality of writing, even though the original study tapped all four domains: listening, reading, speaking, and writing. The result of this teacher effort provides a more accurate process of consolidating and eliminating item formats into specific item test specifications. This progression was highly important in the development of this test after the first pilot trial since statistics did not show item formats that could have been eliminated.