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The Importance of Test Analysis

A test is used to measure student’s ability before instruction, students’ progress during instruction and students’ success after instruction. Test is very important since students can evaluate themselves by seeing the result of it. It also will help teachers to determine the method and topics that they will use and to evaluate their learning activity whether their method in teaching and the topics used is suitable or not. Teachers can use many kinds of test, but it depends on the purpose of the test.

The items of the test also have some benefits. The first, it help teachers to know what topics that students are good or bad on it. So teachers can repeat their learning in the topics that students are bad on it. The socond, it gives students information to help them in learning. So test is very important to be conducted.

What are to analyze in general?
Something that would be analyzed here is grammar II which the type of the test is multiple choice. Multiple choice is most common type test is used in many test. It provides questions are followed by several options which one of them is the correct answer and others are distracters.

This test is given to the second semester of english students of UNISMA, which took 32 students to adminester it. Moreover, the writer considers ten students as an upper group and ten students as a lower group.

What are to analyze in specific?
This analysis here is conducted to analyze validity which focus on the content validity of the test and norm referenced. Content validity is designed to know whether the test reflects the specific intended domain of the content. Moreover, the norm-referenced which it designed to descriminate students ability which it provides three information. These are difficulty level, descriminating power, and effectiveness of distracters.

We can get the three information by conducting these steps:
  1. Arrange all 32 test papers in order from the highest score to the lowest score. 
  2. Select approximately one third of the papers with the highest scores and call this the upper group (10 papers), with the lowest scores and calls it the lower group (10 papers), and set the middle group of paper aside (12 papers). 
  3. For each item, count the upper and the lower group who selected each alternative. 
  4. Record the count from step 3 on a copy of the test, in columns to the left of the alternatives to which it count refers. 
  5. Estimate item difficulty by determining the precentage of students who answer the item correctly. 
  6. Estimate item discriminating power by comparing the number of students in the upper and lower groups who answer the item correctly. 
  7. Determine the effectiveness of the distracters by comparing the answer in the distracters of students in the upper group and the lower group 

Content validity 
The definition of content validity
Content validity is based on the extent to which a measurement reflects the specific intended domain of content (Carmines & Zeller, 1991, p.21).

In psychometrics, content validity (also known as logical validity) refers to the extent to which a measure represents all facets of a given social construct.

It is also defined as any attemp to show that the content of the test is a representative sample from the domain that to be tested. So, a test is said to have content validity if its content is a representative sample of language skills, stuctures, etc.

The importance of content validity:

  • The greater a test’s content validity, the more likely it’s to be an accurate measure of what it is supposed to measure. 
  • Such a test is likely to have a harmful backwash effect.
The Importance of Test Analysis