KNOWLEDGE OF TEST CONSTRUCTION PROCEDURES AMONG LECTURERS IN IGNATIUS AJURU UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION, PORT HARCOURT, NIGERIA

Thesis Overview

<p><b>1.0 INTRODUCTION&nbsp;</b></p><p>The business of teaching and learning cannot be complete without a periodic examination of the learners to determine if set objectives are being achieved. In the university each lecturer is expected to quantify how much the students have achieved from a course of instruction, this is done through the administration of tests by the lecturers who may not have adequate knowledge of test construction procedures, hence most often one encounters question papers that lack the basic psychometric properties (i.e validity, reliability, and usability). The most common tests used by lecturers are teacher–made achievement tests as against standardized tests which have the psychometric properties established. For achievement test, the most important validities to establish are face and content validities. Face validity is concerned with level of English used, if the items are ambiguous, if it is multiple choice you check if they are properly keyed, if the keys come in a pattern, and if there are overlapping items. It is also very important to establish content validity of an achievement test as it is crucial that the test covers the content area the learners have been exposed to; reliability and usability of the tests are also established as achievement is a latent trait. All these are incorporated in test construction procedures which each lecturer should be aware of and follow to be able to set good tests. As the power to assess the students rest on the lecturers. One would expect adequate measures to help lecturers acquire the skills in test construction but this is not the case. To confirm this, Izard (2005) observed that most teacher-made tests assess mainly the lower level processes as Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives specified for the cognitive domain. It becomes pertinent to guide lecturers on test construction procedures, which involves three major steps, (a). Test planning, where you plan the type of test you want to construct, this encompasses things like test format, the number of items to construct, determining the objectives to be assessed and drawing the test blueprint. (b) Item writing: Items are written out bearing in mind ways of improving essay or objective test items, after&nbsp; which the test is given out to other content specialists to establish face and or content validity. The test is then given to an equivalent group to the people the test is intended for trial testing, thereafter item analysis is by calculating the difficulty and discrimination indices of the items. Items are then selected based on the appropriate levels of these indices for norm and criterion-referenced tests. The importance of teachers setting appropriate tests for their students is inarguable considering the value of test scores given by teachers. Researchers have stressed that teacher’s competence greatly impacts on the quality of tests constructed (Chan, 2009, Darling-Hammond, 2012). Marso and Figge (1989) investigated the extent to which supervisors, principals, and teachers agree in assessing their proficiency in testing. The study demonstrated proficiency in assessment skills of the participants. Results showed teachers rating themselves higher than principals while principals rated themselves higher than supervisors. Generally, it was found that they all needed more training in test construction skill. &nbsp;<br></p>