ENGLISH LANGUAGE TESTING " Subjective and Objective Tests "

2008

This study aims (a) to find out the students’ and the instructors’ perceptions of the Compulsory English Language Course exams used to assess language performance at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University (COMU). It further aims (b) to determine what other objective test techniques can also be used in these exams in addition to the multiple-choice test technique by taking all the students’ and the instructors’ opinions into consideration. Quantitative research methodology was used in this descriptive study. In the light of the literature; in order to achieve the aims stated above, two questionnaires were designed by the researcher and administered to 367 students and 33 instructors. After analyzing the internal consistency of the items in the questionnaires, the researcher found acceptable Alpha reliability values both for the students’ questionnaire and for the instructors’ questionnaire. Data from the students and instructors were collected by using these questionnaires. Instructors’ questionnaire was administered to the instructors who had worked or were still working as the instructors of ‘Compulsory English Language Course’ at COMU. The students who involved in the study were all in their second years at the university and they all had the “Compulsory English Language Course” the year before the study was conducted. The data obtained through the questionnaires were analyzed via Descriptive Statistics, One-way ANOVA, Independent Samples T-Test, Cronbach Alpha Reliability Test and Nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis Test by using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) 13.0 for Windows. The findings of the descriptive statistics showed that students expect the instructors to attach more importance to the activities improving their speaking, listening and writing skills. Furthermore, the results displayed that nearly 73 percent of the instructors prefer the exams to be prepared by a testing office while more than half of the students expect them to be prepared by the instructor of the course. The results also revealed that both the students and the instructors believed it was necessary to use other test techniques in addition to the multiple-choice test technique commonly used in the exams. According to the results of the One-way ANOVA, the more successful the students are, the more satisfied they are with the exams’ different characteristics. As for the instructors, Nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis Test results indicated that there occurred no significant differences between instructors’ educational background and the objective test techniques that they use in their classrooms. Additionally, it was found out there were no significant differences between instructors’ educational background and their ideas on the objective test techniques that can be used in the exams. However, the more experienced the instructors are, the more efficient they find the exams prepared by the testing office. Another important finding was that although their order of preferring objective test techniques slightly differs, the first eight test techniques that the students and instructors preferred in the exams were completely same. The study concludes that both the students and the instructors have some doubts about the efficiency of the testing office’s current practices. Therefore, for more efficient exams, test constructors can include the eight objective test techniques [(1) multiple-choice questions, (2) matching, (3) ordering tasks, (4) completion, (5) true-false questions, (6) short-answer questions, (7) error correction and (8) word changing], which were commonly preferred by the instructors and the students, into the Compulsory English Language Course Exams. In addition to the centrally administered achievement tests of this course, instructors should use teacher-made achievement tests and take the scores that students get from these tests into consideration while assessing their learners’ language performance. Moreover, having a testing office with test constructors specialized just at testing will be a good idea for preparing better and more efficient tests.

Journal of English Education and Teaching

The primary purpose of this study is to find out information about the quality of item analysis on English teacher-made tests related to the difficulty level, item discrimination level, validity, and reliability of the final semester assessment for the twelfth-grade student of SMAN 8 Pontianak in the academic year 2020/2021. The researcher conducted this study using descriptive quantitative analysis with the data obtained from the English teacher-made test, consisting of 40 items with 257 test-takers of twelfth-grade students. The researcher analyzed the test items by using the combinations of Master TAP and SPSS Version 16 applications. Based on the difficulty level, the analysis results show that 22 items were categorized as easy, 14 items as medium, and four items as difficult level. Moreover, the item level of item discrimination shows that 9 items are categorized as poor, 18 items as enough, and 13 items as good index level. The analysis results also show that 23 items as valid...

VFast transactions on education and social sciences, 2022

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Language teachers are often faced with the responsibility of selecting or developing language tests for their classrooms and programs. However, deciding which testing alternatives are the most appropriate for a particular language education context can be daunting, especially given the increasing variety of instruments, procedures, and practices available for language testing. Such alternatives include not only test types with long traditions of use-such as multiple choice, matching, true-false, and fill-in-the-blank tests; cloze and dictation procedures; essay exams; and oral interviews-but also tests differing in scope and structure from these well-known options. For example, technological developments have led to a number of new language testing formats, including computer-based and computer-adaptive tests , audiotape-based oral proficiency interviews , and web-based testing (Roever 1998).

EduLite: Journal of English Education, Literature and Culture

Apart from teaching, English language teachers need to assess their students by giving a test to know the students� achievements. In general, teachers are barely conducting item analysis on their tests. As a result, they have no idea about the quality of their test distributed to the students. The present study attempts to figure out the levels of difficulty (LD) and the discriminating power (DP) of the multiple-choice (MC) test item constructed by an English teacher in the reading comprehension test utilizing test item analysis. This study employs a qualitative approach. For this purpose, a test of 50-MC test items of reading comprehension was obtained from the students� test results. Thirty-five students of grade eight took part in the MC test try-out. They are both male (15) and female (20) students of junior high school 2 Kempo, in West Nusa Tenggara Province. The findings revealed that16 items out of 50 test items were rejected due to the poor and worst quality level of difficu...

Theoretical and Practical Advances in Computer-based Educational Measurement, 2019

In constructing tests it is vital that sources of construct irrelevant variance are minimized, in order to enable valid interpretations about the test taker. One important source of construct irrelevance is inaccessibility to the test and its items. In this chapter a framework is presented for design and review of test items, or more broadly, assessments tasks, to ensure their accessibility. An application is presented in the context of theory exams to obtain a drivers' license in the Netherlands. 2.1 Accessibility of Assessments Access in the context of educational testing refers to the opportunity for a student to demonstrate proficiency on a target skill (e.g., reading, mathematics, science). Accessibility is not seen as a static test property but instead, as the result of an interaction among test features and person characteristics that either permit or inhibit student responses to the targeted measurement content (Kettler et al. 2009; Ketterlin-Geller 2008; Winter et al. 2006). In more general terms, accessibility is considered as a prerequisite to validity, the degree to which a test score interpretation is justifiable for a particular purpose and supported by evidence and theory (AERA, APA and NCME 2014; Kane 2004). Limited accessibility can have various causes, that may threaten the validity score interpretation in different ways, depending on the assessment purpose. A first source of limited accessibility pertains to the situation where test takers do not yet master the target skills. If this is the case, a conclusion might be that the test taker needs to go through an extended or adapted learning process. There would not be a threat of validity. However, if the test in general was judged as too difficult for the intended target group, this could be a case of misalignment between test content and intended outcomes, which can be considered as a threat to validity.

1993

This study examine, ' 412 college students ' essay performance on two prompt types, a traditional prose essay and a type incorporating graphics, modeled on those from English Language Challenge Examination (ELCE) developed for the University of Southern California (USC). The majority of the participants were international students at USC. Each individual wrote one essay based on one of four randomly assigned prompts. Each essay was rated by independent raters using a 10-point criterion-referenced rhetorical scale developed for the ELCE. A subsample of 30 essays was additionally analyzed by means of holistic and quantitative rating scales. Differences between the mean scores on the rhetorical scale were found to be insignificant for all subgroups of participants, including various proficiency levels, academic status, field of study, and various native language groups. Initial analyses of students ' responses to two questionnaires

2013

Research studies already commissioned by Umalusi confirm that the emphasis up to now has been on the determination of standards and the compilation of comprehensive and revised curriculum statements. What has not been addressed in depth on the language curriculum side is the system of assessment that is being used and whether the current examination format of the respective language papers sufficiently reflects the revised curriculum. A further aspect that needs scrutiny is the quality and standard of the assessment in the exit-level examinations. Even before the introduction of the NSC and the outcomes-based curriculum, assessment practices were identified as an area of contention in the 2007 report on "Making educational judgements: Reflections on judging standards of intended and examined curricula" (Umalusi 2011b). The need to consider the role of technology as an aid to determining standards and improving the examination system was highlighted in the report of the following year which covered the possibility of item banking and Item Response Theory (IRT) as a means of introducing equivalence between examination papers. Specific mention was made in this report to the necessity of "conceptual clarity of the underlying construct" as a requirement for employing any form of psychometric measurement (ibid. 2011b: 23). Attempting to problematize a unitary construct for measuring the language ability of Grade 12 learners is somewhat ambitious in light of the multi-faceted nature of language and the fact that more than one ability is likely to be assessed simultaneously. The very notion of a construct is also something that needs explaining. Amongst the terms used in language testing literature in relation to the construct are 'blueprint',

東京家政学院筑波女子大学紀要, 2000

2020

Purpose - This study examined the quality of English test items using psychometric and linguistic characteristics among Grade Six pupils. Method - Contrary to the conventional approach of relying only on statistics when investigating item quality, this study adopted a mixed-method approach by employing psychometric analysis and cognitive interviews. The former was conducted on 30 Grade Six pupils, with each item representing a different construct commonly found in English test papers. Qualitative input was obtained through cognitive interviews with five Grade Six pupils and expert judgements from three teachers. Findings - None of the items were found to be too easy or difficult, and all items had positive discrimination indices. The item on idioms was most ideal in terms of difficulty and discrimination. Difficult items were found to be vocabulary-based. Surprisingly, the higher-order-thinking subjective items proved to be excellent in difficulty, although improvements could be mad...