OUC英语测试理论期末小组论文

1 Validity of College English Placement Test Group 2 Pan Haidong Zudi Lixu Director ViVian June 7 2014 Ocean University of China 2 I Introduction Freshmen need to take college English placement test when they enter Ocean University of China College English placement test is intended to provide information that will help to place students at the stage of the teaching programme most appropriate to their abilities However we are not sure whether the test is valid or invalid Therefore based on the theory of language testing we analyze the validity of college English placement test 2012 specificly below We need empirical evidence to assert that whether our test has construct validity or not Such evidence take several forms including the subordinate forms of validity content validity and criterion related validity We shall discuss these two forms of evidence in turn then turn to other forms of evidence II First we study the content validity of the test A Definition of content validity A test is said to have content validity if its content constitutes a representative sample of the language skills structures etc with which it is meant to be concerned B The college English placement test in Ocean University of China has low content validity The greater a test s content validity the more likely it is to be an accurate measure of what it is supposed to measure And this college English placement test is intended to measure freshmen s English abilities in order to place them at different stages the test s composition is as follows Part Component Number of test items Weighting 100 I Reading Comprehension 4 Passages 20 40 II Vocabulary and Structure 40 40 III Cloze 2 Passages 40 20 In addition this test is a completely objective test of the multiple choice type each item with four alternatives1 so the type of expected response is what Popham 1987 refers to as the selected response 2 The students who were selected into the high level have to be proved to have 3 good ability in English listening speaking reading and writing which is also the function of the placement test However in this paper we can only test the candidate s writing and reading abilities which reflects it does not have great content validity In order to improve the content validity we recommend adding test content While considering the time and cost it can be added listening test only ignoring the speaking test III Second we research the predictive validity of the test A Definition of predictive validity Predictive validity is the extent to which a score on a scale or test predicts scores on some criterion measure3 B The college English placement test in OUC has comparatively high predictive validity The placement test is aimed to distinguish students ability is intended to predict candidates future performance If a student get a good score it means his or her English is better than those whose score is low According to these scores students will be divided into two levels to start university English lesson My classmates and I have been taken this kind of placement test consequently some of us start with learning College English Band One while others can start with learning College English Band Three However not all placement tests will correctly make a distinction through some tests In this case we designed a questionnaire to find out the placement test s predictive reliability We survey some students placement test s results and their score of CET4 The result is obvious students whose university English courses begin with College English Band Three the probability that their score of CET4 over 550 is 0 67 meanwhile students whose university English courses begin with College English Band One the probability that their score of CET4 over 550 is 0 42 Generally CET4 and CET6 are highly dependable in people s opinions so we can also say that the placement test is also dependable because of the data we have been found On the one hand this prediction can assign students to English classes at different levels and it s beneficial to students learning On the other hand students who study English Band Three maybe have more pressure and students will have less motivation of learning if they have been required to learn English Band One at the beginning of the freshman year IV Third we investigate the validity in scoring A Definition Validity in scoring means that the way in which the responses are scored must be valid 4 B Validity in scoring of OUC college English placement test is comparatively high A reading test may call for short written responses If the scoring of these responses takes into account spelling then it is invalid For example the third question in passage one of OUC college English placement test When the foreign visitor is immersed in new problems that he finds hard to cope with he is most likely to feel D A uninsured B deprived C baffled D alienated In our test we only need to write D on the paper But if they request us to rewrite the word alienated a few of students may misspell this word unconsciously though they guess the meaning of the word successfully All the questions in our test are multiple choice questions This may guarantee the validity in scoring to some extent V Conclusion In conclusion validity study of the statistic data and the experimental materials have proved the fact that our college English placement test has not only high predictive validity but also high validity in scoring which can meet the