Objectives and Multiple Choice Questions

Objective 1: (Grade 9-12, Economics)

Condition, Behavior, and Criteria: Given an example of a business organization, the student will
correctly identify the type of business organization, with 100% accuracy.
Question 1: Mark opens a bakery with his friend Terry. Mark operates the bakery and Terry
invests money while only expecting a return on investment. Which of the following business
organizations is the bakery?
a.
b.
c.
d.

Sole Proprietorship
Partnership
Corporation
Franchise
Level & Type: 2B - Understanding Conceptual Knowledge
Objective 2: (Grade 9-12, Economics)
Condition, Behavior, and Criteria: When given an illustration of the Circular Flow Diagram, the
learner will correctly identify the flow of resources, with 100% accuracy.

6
4

1
8

2
7
Firms
Households

Question 2: The flow land, labor, and capital to businesses is indicated by

a.
b.
c.
d.

2 to 3
5 to 6
1 to 2
6 to 7
Level & Type: 2B - Understanding Conceptual Knowledge
Objective 3: (Grade 9-12, Economics)

Condition, Behavior, and Criteria: Given an example of a situation effecting supply, the learner
will correctly predict the resulting price and quantity of a good, with 100% accuracy.
Question 3: A severe drought in California has reduced the number of avocados nationwide.
What is the new resulting price and quantity of avocados?

a.
b.
c.
d.

Price
Increase
Increase
Decrease
Decrease

Quantity
Decrease
Increase
Increase
Decrease

Level & Type: 3B - Application of Conceptual Knowledge

Assessment Plan
Improving Item Reliability:
Reliability is defined as the consistency of results over replications of an assessment procedure
(Nitko & Brookhart, 2014). To avoid measurement errors or inconsistencies, an assessment plan
needs to be enabled to improve reliability. For a future replication of these assessment items, the
students should be tested under the same conditions, or as much as possible. Furthermore, these
questions should be asked at the end of the unit, the Midterm assessment, and the Final Exam.
Data is to be recorded for each assessment of these items and compared to measure reliability.

Improving Item Validity:

Validity is defined as the soundness of your interpretations and use of student assessment
results. To improve validity, a number of techniques must be applied to these assessments. Since
the assessment questions reflect the learning objectives, they reflect the content expectations in
state standards, and are in line about what should be taught as well as be assessed (in all
multiple-choice because the state of Georgias high-stakes test, the Georgia Milestone
Assessment is also in complete multiple choice format) the results should be used to assess
student learning of the assessed materials. Furthermore, all material in this assessment is
assigned a similar value, which further demonstrates validity in that one portion is not
emphasized more than another. I believe another teacher using this content assessment in
Economics would agree that the items are both representative and relevant to the course.
Differentiation of Instruction:

This assessment does not, by itself, indicate differentiation. However, to improve instruction and
meet the needs, abilities, interest, and motivations of all learners, these multiple-choice
assessment items could be used in a pre-assessment to find out about students prior knowledge,
readiness, and interests regarding the learning objectives (Nitko & Brookhart, 2014). Using the
questions in a pre-assessment, instructional strategies could be catered to individual students
through formative assessments during the module or unit.
Improving Student Learning:
Improvement of student learning requires immediate feedback on student performance.
Furthermore, students must have the ability to review their correct and incorrect performance and
be able to make corrections to errors (Nitko & Brookhart, 2014)
By providing the students with how the performed (percentage, overall grade, etc.) and giving
the students a description for reason for each correct answer could possibly improve student
learning. Then, assess the students again after they have reviewed from their mistakes. A
drawback to this would be reliability of the test, because it would not make sense to re-test the
students with the same exam after they have reviewed the answers.
Improving Future Assessments:
Future assessments using these questions would need to be analyzed for fairness. In regards to
assessment fairness, awareness of group differences, limited representation of learning outcomes,
and identification of different methods to assess the same outcomes should be considered. The
limitations of this assignment - limited the representation of multiple choice questions that could
be used to assess learner outcomes. Fairness for group differences, especially for those that may
not know what drought or avocados are may be at a distinct disadvantage for question #3.
Different methods could be completed to assess learner objectives and outcomes and should be
reviewed in a blueprint.

Economics - 12th Grade

Georgia Performance Standard
Essay Question Assessment
SSEMI3 The student will explain how markets, prices, and competition influence economic
behavior.
b. Explain and illustrate on a graph how price floors create surpluses and price ceilings
create shortages.

Objectives

Level and Type

Essay Question

Student will explain

and illustrate how
price floors create
surpluses.

Knowledge
Comprehension
Application

Explain how raising minimum wage from

$7.25/hr to $10/hr would lead to a surplus of
labor. Also, depict this situation graphically
using a supply and demand graph.

Student will explain

and illustrate how
price ceilings create
shortages.

Knowledge
Comprehension
Application

Explain how placing a maximum price on rent

below the market price would lead to shortages.
Also, depict this situation graphically using a
supply and demand graph.

SSEMI2 The student will explain how the Law of Demand, the Law of Supply, prices, and
profits work to determine production and distribution in a market economy.
d. Explain how prices serve as incentives in a market economy.
Objectives

Level and Type

Student will explain Analysis

how prices serve as Evaluation
incentives.

Essay Question
Give three examples of situations in which
prices gave you an incentive to purchase or not
purchase a good or service.

Short Answer Assessment

SSEMI2 The student will explain how the Law of Demand, the Law of Supply, prices, and
profits work to determine production and distribution in a market economy.
a. Define the Law of Supply and the Law of Demand.
Objectives

Level and Type

Short-Answer Question

Student will define

the Law of Supply
and Law of
Demand

Knowledge
Application

Define the Law of Supply and the Law of

Demand using the terms price and quantity.

SSEMI3 The student will explain how markets, prices, and competition influence economic
behavior.
c. Define price elasticity of demand and supply.

Objectives

Level and Type

Short-Answer Question

Student will define

the elastic and
inelastic of supply
and demand.

Recall
Knowledge

In 500 words or less, Explain the difference

between inelastic and elastic.

SSEMI1 The student will describe how households, businesses, and governments are
interdependent and interact through flows of goods, services, and money.
a. Illustrate by means of a circular flow diagram, the Product market; the Resource
(factor) market; the real flow of goods and services between and among businesses, households,
and government; and the flow of money.

Objectives

Level and Type

Short-Answer Question

Student will label

the different parts of
the Circular Flow
Model.

Recall
Knowledge

Number your answer document 1-10.

Correctly label the corresponding number to
the Circular Flow Model on your answer
document.

10

Assessment Plan
These items should be used at the end of a unit of instruction, so as to evaluate the learners
understanding of material from the learning modules or other forms of instruction. Furthermore,
the items should be asked at the end of the unit on Microeconomics and at the end of the course.
From the assessed responses, reflection will allow for adjustment to the unit plan in the future as
well as for review (Nitko & Brookhart, 2014).
Improving item reliability:

For the extended-response an advantage for learners is the ability to organize, evaluate, and
synthesize information into a logical argument. However, this can prove problematic as it
pertains to scoring reliability because of subjectivity of scoring. Without training, teachers may
award different marks to the same responses (Nitko & Brookhart, 2014). As a result, teachers
should include a thorough and detailed scoring rubric so as to improve reliability and consistency
in scoring.
Improving item validity:
The terms and content assessed in the extended and short-answer responses are reflective of the
learning objectives the students are expected to perform. The learning objectives use similar
language as the Georgia Performance Standards and the essay questions evaluate student
performance based off of the learning objectives.
Some of the criteria for validity featured within this assessment, as categorized by Nitko &
Brookhart (p.41,2014) include:

Emphasis on what was taught

Represents [state of Georgias] stated curricular content
Requirement of student to integrate and use several thinking schools
Contain tasks that cannot be completed without using intended thinking skills
Contain individual task items that are not too difficult or too hard.
Free of ethnic, racial, and gender bias
Differentiation of Instruction:
To meet the needs of students and reflect the universal design for learning, appropriate steps
must be taken to give students a variety of ways to demonstrate their knowledge. Students could
write their answers, use a computer to type and submit their answers, or orally state their answers
through software, such as Audacity, and submit it as an MP3 file. None of the response questions
ask students to be grammatically correct and that should be reflected in a rubric as well. This
would be to insure English Language Learners or students with disabilities wouldnt be
penalized.
Improving Student Learning:
Improvement of student learning requires immediate feedback on student performance.
Furthermore, students must have the ability to review their correct and incorrect performance and
be able to make corrections to errors (Nitko & Brookhart, 2014).
Since these items could be used as a formative or summative assessment (either after the
completion of instruction or completion of the Microeconomics Unit), these questions could

guide instruction based on students ability to demonstrate their knowledge. If necessary,

instruction could be modified to extend instruction on a particular concept, or be used as review
for the end-of-course assessments.
Students should also be able to correct their mistakes through either corrections or rewrites - only
after they have been re-taught the material.
Improving Future Assessments:
To improve the assessment items, test fairness issues should be applied to make sure that the
items were not biased toward any one group and accommodations that were not recognized may
need to be required when assessing different students (Nitko & Brookhart, 2014).

Objectives: The objectives in these questions pertain to the standards as developed by the
Georgia Department of Education for the Microeconomics unit in the course on Economics.
Specifically, each of these questions align to a standard in Microeconomics. The standard will be
published with each of these performance tasks.
Question 1

Think of five items in the school that many

students like to buy. Create a survey and ask
several students if they would buy an item at
different amounts.
For example, asking a student if they would
pay $.50 for a bag of chips from the vending
machine; $1; $1.50; $2.00.
After you have conducted the survey, which
items were elastic? Inelastic? Explain your
answers.

Standard

SSEMI3 The student will explain how

markets, prices, and competition influence
economic behavior.

Level and Type

Application, Analyzation, Evaluation, Creation

Rubric

Student created survey

Student did not created/

conduct survey

Student created survey of

5 questions but did not
conduct it.

Student created survey

and conducted it to 10 or
less students.

Student created survey

and conducted it to 11+
students.

Inelastic/ Elastic

Student did not have state

Student stated whether

Student stated whether

Student stated whether

Explanation

Question 2

whether items were

elastic or inelastic.

items were elastic or

inelastic for 2 items.

items were elastic or

inelastic for 3 items.

items were elastic or

inelastic for 5 items.

No explanation for why

item was elastic or
inelastic.

Items had explanations

for whether they were
elastic or inelastic, but
did not use data from
survey to support
decision

Items had explanations

for whether they were
elastic or inelastic but
not all were supported by
data in the survey .

All items had

explanations as to
whether they were
inelastic or elastic and
the decisions were
supported by data.

Create a cartoon regarding the effects of

supply and demand. After you have created
the cartoon, briefly explain why it reflects the
Laws of Supply and Demand.
A couple of examples are provided:

Standard

SSEMI2 The student will explain how the

Law of Demand, the Law of Supply, prices,
and profits work to determine production and
distribution in a market economy.
a. Define the Law of Supply and the Law of

Demand.
b. Describe the role of buyers and sellers in
determining market clearing price.
Application, Analyzation, Evaluation, Creation

Level and Type

Rubric

Student cartoon

Student did not create

cartoon

Student created cartoon ,

but no obvious
applications of the Law
of Supply or Demand was
included

Student created cartoon,

but only one of the two
applications - either Law
of Supply or Demand
were included.

Student created cartoon

and both the Law of
Supply and Demand were
applied to it in an
obvious way.

Creativity

Student did not create

cartoon depicting a reallife situation or example
of a real-life problem in
cartoon

Student created situation,

but the situation does not
connect to any real-life,
current, or social
problem involving supply
or demand

Student created cartoon

featuring events that
connected to any reallife, current, or social
problem involving supply
or demand.

Student created cartoon

featuring events that
connected to any reallife, current, or social
problem involving supply
or demand. Also included
color.

Explanation

No explanation for why

cartoon connected to
Law of Supply and
Demand.

Explanation for
connection to Law of
Supply or Law of
Demand, but not both.

Explanation for why the

cartoon connected to the
Law of Supply and Law
of Demand, but lacked
depth in regards to events
in real-life, current, or
social problems related
to it. (Evidence)

Explanation for why the

cartoon connected to the
Law of Supply and Law
of Demand, and included
depth in regards to events
in real-life, current, or
social problems related
to it.

Question 3

You are in charge of setting the ticket prices

for the Atlanta Braves this season. The
manager has just informed you that the team
is moving to dynamic pricing. Dynamic
pricing is defined as setting prices based
increase/ or decreased demand.
Find the average ticket price for a Braves
game last year. Research the attendance for
last years games for each team that visited.
Find the average number of fans that attended
for each game for each team (I.E. The average
number of fans for the Washington Nationals
games were [number]. Create a bar graph for
each team that visited displaying the average
number of people that attended. Find this
seasons schedule and see if those teams are
visiting Atlanta.

If the teams are again visiting this season then

explain in your own words which games
should the ticket prices be raised and which
games the ticket prices be lowered. Include in
your answer factors that could cause changes
in the demand for these tickets for this season.
Standard

SSEMI3 The student will explain how

markets, prices, and competition influence
economic behavior.
a. Identify and illustrate on a graph factors
that cause changes in market supply and
demand
SSEMI2 The student will explain how the
Law of Demand, the Law of Supply, prices,
and profits work to determine production and
distribution in a market economy.
b. Describe the role of buyers and sellers in
determining market clearing price
d. Explain how prices serve as incentives in a
market economy.

Level and Type

Application, Analyzation, Evaluation, Creation

Checklist :
Find average ticket price for Braves game last year (1 pts.)
Find average number of fans that attended each game for each team that visited last year (6 pts.)
Create bar graph depicting the average number of fans that visited on average for each team that
visited last year. (6 pts.)
Find this seasons schedule, write down the teams that visited last year and that will visit this
year (2 pts.)
Explanation for why the ticket price should be lowered or raised for each team visiting this
season. (16 pts.)
Each explanation has a factor that could possibly change demand for each team visiting. (16 pts,)

Improving Item Reliability:

Reliability is defined as the consistency of results over replications of an assessment procedure
(Nitko & Brookhart, 2014). Because scores with rubrics result in lower reliability, extra steps
need to be taken to improve reliability of performance based assessments. Therefor, to improve

reliability amongst these assessment questions should have analytic components for a rater to
assess. That is, each criterion for a question could be evaluated separately (p.279). For example,
The third objective could have points awarded for the separate tasks within the question because
it has a checklist form to it.

Improving Item Validity:

One obvious problem with performance and portfolio assessments, as a teacher, you want to
coach the student to do the assessment well. If your coaching amounts to teaching all aspects of
your states standards and your schools curriculum frameworks learning objectives, you are
doing the right thing, (Nitko & Brookhart, 2014). Possibly providing examples on how to do the
assessment, like Question 2, may be in a sense coaching which does not teach students to
perform a task - but rather coaches them. To improve validity in this task, as well as other that
reflect examples on how to do something - eliminating examples may encourage student in
performing tasks even from ill-structured problems. Also, to improve the overall validity of this
assessment, these objectives have been derived from the State of Georgia Performance Standards
(georgiastandards.org).

Differentiation of Instruction:
Differentiated instruction refers to the teaching methods that are adjusted to meet the needs,
abilities, interests, and motivations of students. By having multiple performance/ portfolio
assessments like there is in question 2 & 3 of this draft, an instructor can take pertinent data from
a pre-test and have a student(s) do one question or another based on how well they did on the
pre-assessment. If a student did very well, it may be necessary to challenge their abilities by
giving them a task lie question 3. If they dont understand the material - a more simpler question
like #2 may be necessary.

Improving Student Learning:

In order for students to benefit from this assessment, timely feedback is necessary. Furthermore,
students should have the ability to review their correct and incorrect performance and be able to
make corrections to errors (Nitko & Brookhart, 2014). Because these questions require depth and
numerous skills, it would behoove the instructor to use previous student work to show examples
of how the students were about to perform the task in previous assessments. It may result in
lower validity and reliability, but if the assessments are vitally important to the course and reflect
the current methods/knowledge to understand the material and concepts - it may be warranted.

Improving Future Assessments:

With performance assessments come unforeseen problems that can be adjusted or eliminated
with each administration of the assessment. Therefore, revision of the assessment task (p.306) as
well as developing constructs from which to assess in the form of rubrics, checklists, etc may be
necessary. Changes based on student may be valuable and could be done through a questionnaire
or survey after the assessment has been complete. This could insure that all students that finish
the learning objective found that the performance task aligned with the knowledge they believe
they needed to know to complete it.

Objectives: The objectives in these questions pertain to the standards as developed by the Georgia
Department of Education for the Microeconomics unit in the course on Economics. Specifically, each of
these questions align to a standard in Microeconomics. The standard will be published with each of these
higher-order-thinking questions.
Question 1: Study the information in the chart below. How is the current and projected population and
age of Baby Boomers likely to affect the products that are marketed now and in the future?
Standard: SSEMI3 The student will explain how markets, prices, and competition influence economic
behavior.
Level and Type: Evaluate, Conceptual, and Knowledge

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Question 2: Read the excerpt below. What factors that cause changes in supply and demand
could affect the prices of baseball game tickets to the Atlanta Braves? Give at least two factors
for supply and two factors for demand and explain how these factors relate to the changing
ticket prices for a given week, day, or time before the game.
Standard: SSEMI2 The student will explain how the Law of Demand, the Law of Supply, prices,
and profits work to determine production and distribution in a market economy.
b. Describe the role of buyers and sellers in determining market clearing price.
Level and Type: Evaluate, Conceptual, and Knowledge

Atlanta-Journal Constitution, March 21st, 2012

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Question 3: List 5 items that you recently bought. Explain whether your demand for each item
is mostly elastic or inelastic. Also, for each item give a factor that could change the demand you
have for that item.
Standard: SSEMI3 The student will explain how markets, prices, and competition influence
economic behavior

Level and Type: Evaluate, Conceptual, and Knowledge.

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Assessment Plan
Improving Item Reliability:
Reliability is defined as the consistency of results over replications of an assessment procedure
(Nitko & Brookhart, 2014). To improve the ability of student consistency, providing the students
with a rubric so-as to demonstrate the expectations for each question may be necessary. That
way, students will not respond to each question with varying lengths and explanations. Also,
keeping the testing conditions as similar as possible for each application, such as a time limit,
would keep students from responding to the questions as varying length - which could ultimately
influence the responses to each question.

Improving Item Validity:

Validity is defined as the soundness of your interpretations and use of student assessment results
(Nitko & Brookhart, 2014). The questions in this assessment are valid because they reflect the
content that the students learn in the Microeconomics unit per the Georgia Performance
Standards. Furthermore, Nitko and Brookhart provide criteria for improving validity scores from
classroom assessments (p.41). The content is representative and relevant because it represents the
state of Georgias curricular content and is content worth learning. The assessment requires
students to integrate and use several thinking skills and contains tasks that cannot be completed
without using intended thinking skills. It also required a reasonable amount of time to construct
and represents an appropriate use of student class time. In order to improve validity further, this
assessment should be used in conjunction with other assessments such as multiple choice.

Differentiation of Instruction:

To meet the needs of students and reflect the universal design for learning, appropriate steps
must be taken to give students a variety of ways to demonstrate their knowledge. To aid student
with potential reading or writing disabilities, software such as Audacity could be used to record
the student responses. Students could also submit their responses via cloud services, such as
Google forms or Google Docs. Based on the results from this assessment, individualized
instructional tasks could be given to students that demonstrated various ranges of knowledge and
abilities in this assessment.

Improving Student Learning:

In order for students to benefit from this assessment, timely feedback is necessary. Furthermore,
students should have the ability to review their correct and incorrect performance and be able to
make corrections to errors (Nitko & Brookhart, 2014). Because this are complicated questions
that involve many skills, it may benefit the students to review correct answers, For example, after
the assessment has taken place, an instructor could post a screencast demonstrating the types of
skills and thought processes necessary to answer these questions.

Improving Future Assessments:

In the future, evaluators of this assessment should consider whether the assessment was fair in
the sense that the questions were not misused for the purpose of student
evaluation/representation of knowledge and that the proper procedures were followed and
allowed in regards to accommodations. Also, bias should be investigated as well. For example, in
the question about Baby Boomers, it may be noted that not all students are aware of who Baby
Boomers are - and that it may be necessary to address that in the question.