Measuring Pickle Fanaticism: An open dataset for teaching instrument development and reliability

Abstract

We developed the Pickle Fanaticism Scale and collected pedagogical datasets with the items for the purpose of teaching measurement theory concepts. This paper introduces the datasets and accompanying activities focused on item analysis and reliability. The scale includes items that violate item writing guidelines and others that don’t, which enables students to use their problem solving and critical thinking skills to understand how violating these guidelines can impact the psychometric properties of a scale. In our demonstration, we ask students to conduct an item and reliability analysis using R and interpret the results while considering the content of the items. The dataset is free to use, and those teaching measurement topics may use our activities or design their own.

Keywords

• measurement theory
• instrument development
• reliability
• item analysis
• psychometrics
• r