An assessment or test of a person should give the same results whenever you apply the test.
Test-retest reliability evaluates reliability across time.
Reliability can vary with the many factors that affect how a person responds to the test, including their mood, interruptions, time of day, etc. A good test will largely cope with such factors and give relatively little variation. An unreliable test is highly sensitive to such factors and will give widely varying results, even if the person re-takes the same test half an hour later.
Generally speaking, the longer the delay between tests, the greater the likely variation. Better tests will give less retest variation with longer delays.
Of course the problem with test-retest is that …show more content…
This helps the researcher determine those questions and combinations that have better reliability.
In the development of national school tests, a class of children are given several tests that are intended to assess the same abilities. A week and a month later, they are given the same tests. With allowances for learning, the variation in the test and retest results are used to assess which tests have better test-retest reliability.
Parallel-Forms Reliability
One problem with questions or assessments is knowing what questions are the best ones to ask. A way of discovering this is do two tests in parallel, using different questions.
Parallel-forms reliability evaluates different questions and question sets that seek to assess the same construct.
Parallel-Forms evaluation may be done in combination with other methods, such as Split-half, which divides items that measure the same construct into two tests and applies them to the same group of people.
Examples
An experimenter develops a large set of questions. They split these into two and administer them each to a randomly-selected half of a target