“What’s a good measure of that outcome?” Resources to find existing and psychometrically-sound measures

Sara J. Finney, Gabriel R. Gilmore, & Sarah Alahmadi   |    Volume 16 Issue 2  |   

When engaging in outcomes assessment, higher education professionals (i.e., faculty, student affairs educators) are expected to gather reliable data and make valid inferences. Decisions about how to measure student learning and development outcomes impact inferences about the achievement of outcomes and determination of improvement efforts. Professionals may search for existing outcome measures due to lack of experience in the challenging instrument development process and/or the time required to construct a high-quality measure. To support professionals in their search, we created a tool that describes relevant repositories of measures. Given most professionals lack training in psychometrics, we purposefully categorized these repositories by the level of guidance they provide when selecting a measure. That is, in addition to identifying an existing measure and summarizing the measure’s psychometric properties, some repositories provide an evaluation of the measure’s quality. This resource facilitates the collection of high-quality data that informs valid inferences about student outcomes.

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