Test Creation And Justification

UNIVERSIDAD DE GUANAJUATO
DEM YURIRIA
BA in TESOL
PROFESSOR: ANA TODD
EI-400 TALLER DE DISEÑO DE EVALUACIONES DE INGLES
FINAL TASK: TEST CREATION AND JUSTIFICATION
BY: JANETTE LOPEZ MIRANDA
DECEMBER 9th, 2011

An essential part of being a Language teacher is the fact of designing tests for our pupils, so that their ability can be measured. Exams are designed so frequently that it isimportant to learn what the best procedure to assemble it is, in order to achieve a product which would be beneficial for the students’ learning process, instead of a harmful one.
At times, students get a bad result on a test, not precisely because they do not possess the knowledge, but because the test might be constructed wrongly, or maybe because the instructions were either ambiguous or toodifficult, or perhaps because the content did not correspond to the topics covered in class, among other many reasons.
Many aspects must be taken into consideration, when it comes to test building, to ensure productivity; some of the most important are: validity, reliability, scoring scales, length, purpose of itself, positive backwash generator, and so on.
In this paper, the reader will bewell-versed through a justification of the choices about what was included on the test set as a sample, based on a particular syllabus, and the reasons why.

According to Douglas Brown (2004) on his book Language Assessment: Principles and classroom practices, there are some practical steps to test construction:
1. First and foremost, the purpose of the test must be set.
2. What is onewants to test.
3. Have well-identified objectives according to the unit content.
4. Skills to be tested.
5. Type of items corresponding to the purpose.
6. Number of items in each section.
7. Time to perform each section.
As displayed on the syllabus attached to this paper, the specific purposes of unit 6, which is the one being evaluated at the moment, are: to get acquaintedwith phrasal verbs, to be able to make requests either in an impolite manner as well as a polite one, to accept or to decline requests, and development of the skills included on a TOEFL test (grammar analysis, listening, reading) as well as a little bit of writing.
The book, in which the syllabus is based on, is called Interchange 2 Third Edition. This is based on a Communicative Approach,targeted for low-intermediate students; as it may be seen, there is no task on the exam that grades speaking due to the time limit, in addition, speaking drills are mostly performed during class practice; that is why grammar understanding is highly considered since it is part of the TOEFL test (necessary for graduating). Validity is “the extent to which inferences made from assessment results areappropriate, meaningful, and useful in terms of the purpose of the assessment” (Brown, 2004). Validity is important because “ the more content validity, the more likely it is to be an accurate measure of what is supposed to measure… such a test is likely to have positive backwash effect” (Hughes, 2003).
Back wash is considered to be “the effect of testing, harmful or beneficial” (Hughes, 2003).“Teachers return tests with a single numerical grade and consider their job done. In reality, a numerical score gives absolutely no information of intrinsic interest to the student. When returning any kind of test, consider giving more than a number as feedback, like constructive criticism of weaknesses since backwash helps students through a specification of the numerical score” (Brown, 2004)
“Areliable test is consistent and dependable. If you give the same test to the same student on two different occasions, the test should yield similar results” (Brown, 2004)
The type of the test in question is of an achievement test, in simpler words, as said by Arthur Hughes (2003) on his book: Testing for Language teachers, an achievement test “ is applied during a language course to check how...