Direct and Indirect Test Items

In assessment, there are two categories that most test items fall into which are direct and
indirect test items.
Direct test items ask the student to complete some sort of authentic action.
Indirect test items measure a students knowledge about a subject.
This post will provide examples of test items that are either direct or indirect items.

Direct Test Items

Direct test items used authentic assessment approaches. Examples in TESOL would include
the following…
A test item is direct when the learner’s response involves actually
performing the communicative skill or lg recognition/production task that is being assessed.

For speaking: Interviews and presentations

For writing: Essay questions
For reading: Using real reading material and having the student respond to question
verbally and or in writing
For listening: Following oral directions to complete a task

The primary goal of direct test items is to be as much like real-life as possible. Often, direct
testing items are integrative, which means that the student has to apply several skills at once.
For example, presentations involve more than just speaking but also the writing of the speech,
the reading or memorizing of the speech as well as the critical thinking skills to develop the
speech.
Indirect Test Items
Indirect test items assess knowledge without authentic application. Below are some common
examples of indirect test items.

Multiple choice questions

Cloze items
Paraphrasing
Sentence re-ordering
Multiple Choice
Multiple choice questions involve the use of a question followed by several potential answers.
It is the job of the student to determine what is the most appropriate answer. Some
challenges with writing multiple choice is the difficulty of writing incorrect choices. For ever
correct answer you need several wrong ones. Another problem is that with training, students
can learn how to improve their success on multiple choice test without having a stronger
knowledge of the subject matter.

Cloze Items
Cloze item involve giving the student a paragraph our sentence with one or more blanks in it
that the student have to complete. One problem with Cloze items is that more than one answer
may be acceptable for a blank. This can lead to a great deal of confusion when marking the
test.

Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing is strictly for TESOL and involves having the student rewrite a sentence in a
slightly different way as the example below.

“I’m sorry I did not go to the assembly”

I wish________________________________

In the example above the student needs to write the sentence in quotes starting with the phrase
“I wish.” The challenging is determining if the paraphrase is reasonable as this is highly
subjective.

Sentence Re-Ordering
In this item for TESOL assessment, a student is given a sentence that is out of order and they
have to arrange the words so that an understandable sentence is developed. This one way to
assess knowledge of syntax. The challenge is that for complex sentences more than one
answer may be possible