Poolbooks

Introduction

Working with lists of items is a daily part of a test development professional’s working life. The lists have many purposes and life spans, but at some point, all have outlived the purpose for which they were constructed. Sometimes, lists have an identity in the routine business processes of the assessment organization—for example, the list of operational items for the upcoming administration. While the content of that list changes from admin to admin, the list has an identity as an input to routine business processes. Other lists are ad hoc. They are created to serve some temporary purpose, and the list ceases to exist once it has served its purpose.

Pro! formalizes the handling of lists of items via its Poolbook feature. A Poolbook is an arbitrary list of items. An authorized user can create a Poolbook and populate it with items selected for the purpose the Poolbook will serve.

Poolbooks have special characteristics. Here are a few of them:

Items in a Poolbook can be manually ordered. The order of items within the Poolbook can be updated as needed.
A Poolbook’s items can be locked against edit. This prevents a user from editing any item in the Poolbook until the lock is removed.
Special print features help format paper reports of the items in a Poolbook, identifying the parts of the item to print and the order in which they should be printed.
Exporting item content and associated metadata in HTML and XML formats.
Perform an Enemy Analysis against the items within the Poolbook using NLP and AI.
Bulk update of Poolbook items, quickly applying the same change to all items.

Let’s take a look at Poolbooks and the value they provide.

Authorize

The system administrator configures two types of user associations with Poolbooks.

The first type is the ordinary Poolbook user. The administrator configures for each such user his or her ability to create, edit, and print Poolbooks.
The second type is the user with more advanced access rights to bulk update and export.

Create

An authorized user creates an empty Poolbook and enters a few data elements, such as the Poolbook’s name and the ID of the person for whom the Poolbook is being prepared (if other than the creator). A Poolbook can also be created and populated from the Item Search results page.

Fill

After creation, a Poolbook is filled with items that have similar characteristics reflecting the Poolbook’s purpose: for example, items that performed poorly on the last administration, items waiting for committee approval to be pretested, items that have been in service a very long time, etc.

There are three ways to add items to it: transfer the results of an Item Search, import a list of item identifiers from a file, or enter item identifiers separated by a comma by hand or pasting from the clipboard. After the initial fill, a user can add more items to a Poolbook. Again, utilize any of the methods listed above.

Items can be removed from a Poolbook, too. It is important to realize that a Poolbook contains a reference to an item and not the item itself. Other users still have access to the items the Poolbook contains.

Print

An authorized user can print the items in a Poolbook to a Word or PDF report in two formats: linear (item data printed down the page) or tabular (item data printed across the page). The tabular option also supports reports in Excel and CSV (comma-separated values) formats.

The data elements to print for each item are selected by the user. A report can include almost every data element Pro! keeps about an item. There are too many data elements to list here, but, briefly, a report can include the item’s status, identity of the item writer, item’s content, rationales, classifications, and more.

Special features include the ability to insert blank lines and page breaks wherever desired, as well as the option to include page headers, footers, and page numbering.

Poolbook reports are attractively formatted and suitable for executive or committee review. When printed in Word format, the user can add a title page or combine additional information before circulating the report.

Item Review

Poolbooks are a natural way to supply the items for review for assessment organizations that circulate items in printed copy and those that conduct face-to-face or remote reviews. While Item Review is described in another feature brief, suffice it to say here that setting up an Item Review project requires the assignment of Poolbooks the reviewers will consider. (Recall that Poolbooks can include items of any status, and the review can be for any purpose—for example, approving items for pretest, paring obsolete items, etc.)

Additionally, Poolbooks aid Item Review in the following ways: item ordering (manually arranging items in the desired order) and item locking (applying an edit lock that prevents modification of the Poolbook’s items while the items are out for review).

Want to get a closer look at Pro!

Contact us and schedule a demo!

schedule