Brainstorm and write down your goals for the test. What do you hope to accomplish with this test? What should your students have learned? To what degree should they be able to demonstrate this knowledge?
Identify the goals that are most important. Once you have written down the goals that come to mind, you must then narrow your list down to what is most important. You may be able to combine one or more similar goals into one goal.
Define these goals in your test objectives. Once you have set your goals, you must then write them into measurable objective form. For example, if your goal is to measure reading comprehension, then you will need to rewrite that as, "After reading the text, students will identify the correct responses for the corresponding questions with at least 80 percent accuracy."
Use good performance words. There are two types of "action" words: those that cannot be measured objectively -- such as understand, know and learn -- and those that can be measured objectively, such as select, solve and demonstrate. Good performance words are those that are measurable. Sometimes the difference between well-written test objectives and poorly written test objectives are the action words used.
List the conditions for which the objective will be completed. For example, "after reading the paragraph" may be a condition if the objective focuses on reading comprehension. If you have one condition for multiple objectives, you can list the condition once and then list the objectives below it in bullet-point style to avoid redundancy.
State the degree to which the student must perform in order to complete the objective. If the only criterion is that they answer correctly within the time frame of the test, then this information does not need to be added. However, in instances where the desired performance deviates from these set controls, then it should be defined in the objective.
Form your test questions directly from your test objectives. This means that for every test objective, you should have at least one question on the test that will help you determine whether the student has met the objective.