To take language assessment as an example, the test construct could be communicative language ability, or speaking ability, or perhaps even a construct as specific as pronunciation. Some examples of constructs are: intelligence, personality, anxiety, English language ability, pronunciation. Before designing a test, you need to identify the ability or skill that the test is designed to measure – in technical terms, the ‘test construct’. Test Construct – What am I testing?Īnother key point is to consider what you want to test. If you are testing listening skills, for example, you might want to use role plays for doctors, but lectures or monologues with university students. If your test takers are primary school children, for instance, you might want to give them more interactive tasks or games to test their language ability. Is it primary school children or teenagers or adults? Or is it airline pilots or doctors or engineers? This is an important question because the test has to be appropriate for the test takers it is aimed for. It’s also vital to keep in mind who is taking your test. For example, a test certifying that doctors can practise in an English-speaking country would be different from a placement test which aims to place those doctors into language courses. The purpose of the test determines the type of test you're going to produce, which in turn affects the kinds of tasks you're going to choose, the number of test items, the length of the test, and so on. Each of these different reasons for testing represents a different test purpose. Or, you might want to use a test to place learners into groups based on their ability, or to provide test takers with a certificate of language proficiency. You could be trying to check their learning at the end of a unit, or trying to understand what they know and don't know. There are several reasons why you might want to test your students. Instead, we can say that a test is valid for a particular purpose.
We can never really say that a test is valid or not valid. Validity has different elements, which we are now going to look at in turn.
A valid language test for university entry, for example, should include tasks that are representative of at least some aspects of what actually happens in university settings, such as listening to lectures, giving presentations, engaging in tutorials, writing essays, and reading texts. For example, a valid driving test should include a practical driving component and not just a theoretical test of the rules of driving. Validity refers to whether a test measures what it aims to measure. The fundamental concept to keep in mind when creating any assessment is validity.
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