Testlets

What are testlets?

The term testlets was first officially introduced in late 1980s and defined as

“a group of items related to a single content area that is developed as a unit and contains a fixed number of predetermined paths that an examinee may follow.”1) Wainer, Howard, and Gerard L Kiely. Item Clusters and Computerized Adaptive Testing: A Case for Testlets. Journal of Educational Measurement 24, no. 3: 185-201, September 1987.

Simplified, testlets:2) Wainer, Howard, and Charles Lewis. Toward a Psychometrics for Testlets. Journal of Educational Measurement 27, no. 1: 1-14, Spring 1990.

are small tests of single units from which together construct a test;

should be small enough to manipulate but big enough to carry their own context;

can be used to balance contents of a test.