Background and Goals - part 13
It is therefore not true to say that because the teachers felt the children were more at ease with the tests when they encountered them in unit 2 that there necessarily ensued better marks. This would imply that in unit 1, despite the newness of the testing methodology, this aspect did not seem to cause method effect and impede the children showing the trait that was required to be tested.
Test Validity
I set out to measure to what extent the children had learnt the material presented to them in the two units. For this the test model was contrived as described earlier in this paper. The battery of tests set out to test specific vocabulary and syntactic structures in a series of assessment tests.
Some of the test tasks were indeed authentic as they were games that the children played without any awareness of being tested. The motivation for playing the game was fun and the desire to do well for the team. Other tasks such as the pen and paper tasks and the individual interviews were more obviously tests and involved a degree of artificiality as the asker does not need to know the information for himself, but in order to test the testee (Searle).
As pointed out by Spolsky (199 ):
this establishes the social contract of the test: an understanding on the part of the person taking the test that the performance is necessary and relevant to the task. But .... even the best prepared test still contains at least a modicum of error, and however hard we may have worked on validity, we must be left with doubts about what it is we have measured.
Spolsky goes on to say that:
the more generalized a test is, the less accurate its results will be for any individual.
As we have discussed that the test were all highly specific in their content, we can deduce from this that the results will be more accurate.
We could claim lack of objectivity and thus lack of validity in the tests. None-the-less, all the teachers interviewed felt that the test accurately reflected the ability of the children as they felt their judgment and assessment to be fair and objective. Thus they claimed predictive ability for the tests, which was borne out by the results of the tests given in the second unit as compared to unit 1. The teachers were satisfied with the tests and reported the feedback they received from the tests as valuable to know how to progress with material and how and what to teach individual children.
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 1
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 2
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 3
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 4
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 5
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 6
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 7
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 8
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 9
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 10
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 11
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 12
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 13
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 14
- English for Children - Background and Goals - Part 15