Spera at NREMT

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Spera at the National Registry

Second EMT-Basic Item Writing Committee Concludes Work at NREMT Offices
By William E. Brown
Posted 4/19/02

The National Registry of EMTs hosted a second EMT-Basic Item Writing Committee meeting in March of 2002 at the NREMT offices in Columbus, Ohio. Twelve item writers drafted items based upon the tasks in the NREMT practice analysis and within the content domain of the NSC EMT-Basic curriculum. The writers then submitted their items to the NREMT and traveled to the office to revise, re-write, discard, and improve the items as a group. All items were reviewed for grammar, reading level, correctness, rationalization, relationship to the EMT-Basic knowledge domain and literature. The writers had an opportunity to experience first-hand the difficulty of having others critique their work. Physician writers were from Ohio, Texas and Connecticut. The state director was from Mississippi and the state training director was from Maryland. The educator item writers were from California, Nebraska, Texas, Connecticut, Tennessee, Arizona and the US Army. The grouped termed the working weekend "educational." We thank them for helping assure the NREMT items are content valid. The next phase of examination development will be pilot testing which will occur across the nation this spring. Following Standard Setting and Final Item Review by a separate committee, the items will begin to appear on NREMT-Basic examinations sometime in 2003.