Item Development

Advanced item development services

Our item development skills and techniques are amongst the very best in the business.

• We offer both face-to-face and online development services.
• We provide standardized item-writer training from psychometricians.
• We develop standard and advanced item types including multiple-choice, simulation, performance-based, and drag and drop.
• We oversee review and validation of each item by certification-level practitioners.

Keep your exams on the cutting-edge of your industry

With the changes taking place in virtually every industry today, examinations must be updated on an increasingly regular basis. That, in turn, means that new test questions need to be developed almost constantly. At CASTLE, we have a system that provides a consistent, high-quality result.

Secure development - online

We use our own proprietary online system, called I-DEV, for item development. Subject matter experts can now develop, review, and validate new items from their home, office, or on the road. Our system supports a large pool of item writers while eliminating the travel costs and scheduling conflicts associated with in-person meetings.

Detailed reporting capabilities

Our progressive system allows us to collect valuable information on each and every test item, including:

Item writer

Date written

Item text, distractors, and key

Graphics, charts and tables

Multiple complete references

Cognitive level

Classification based on content (up to 3 levels)

Item status (scored, experimental, revised, retired, etc.)

Validation ratings (up to 3 scales )

Angoff average

Equating and other measures

Personalized development services

Our item development system is not off-the-shelf software. It was developed by our in-house staff so it can adapt to the varying and changing needs of clients and it can be customized for your needs. We have also linked I-DEV to our item banking, test delivery, and scoring systems so items are not loaded multiple times into multiple systems.

Track your writers' progress

I-DEV creates valuable reports on the individual performance of each item writer. We can identify and report on the percentage of questions that have been accepted by independent reviewers for each item writer. It also tracks modifications during the review process and provides reports on the number of questions modified, accepted, and rejected by each item reviewer.