Revising a test.

After administering the test to my students yesterday, I was able to ‘test” my test,
in terms of Validity, Reliability, Practicality, Authenticity and to notice the
backwash effect it had.

To begin with, I believe it is a valid test from different perspectives; it has

Construct Validity because it is a foreign language test, and it was designed
under the light of Second Language Teaching Techniques, such as Scanning,
skimming, top-bottom and bottom-up procedures, elicitation techniques etc…
It has content-validity since the test was designed taking samples from the
content of the unit found in the Specifications.

It has Criterion-related validity, according to Hughes, (1989:27) “A test may be

validated against, for example, teachers’ assessments of their students.” So I
validated this test against the results obtained in class.

Practicality, regarding this point, I designed the test to be administered within a

fifty minute class, so when I finally administered it yesterday, it took my students
only 42 minutes to complete it. So, this way, I could corroborate it is a practical
test.

Reliability; since I have just finished administering the test and I have not had the
opportunity to administer a second version to my students ( following the test-
retest method) , or to make a longer version to apply the split-half method, I can
say that I can’t prove, at this moment , my test to be reliable or not.

Authenticity; the test was divided into three parts: reading comprehension, writing
and Grammar and lexis, I’ll analyze my test in each part.
In the first part, reading comprehension, I included a text from the course book,
so the language used in it had a thematic organization in order to contextualize
all the items in the test.
In the second part, writing, I included a writing test based on an e-mail format,
since all my students are more familiar with this means of communication than
with old-fashion letter writing. The e-mail format provided the necessary
contextual clues to make it “similar to real world tasks” (Bunting, 2004). I also
included sentences so I could evaluate specific writing skills instead of overall
writing efficiency.

The last part, grammar and lexis, I designed the items on a “conversation”
context so students can relate grammar to conversational skills, authenticity
comes from the discourse skills students must develop from grammar
knowledge.

Backwash effect; some of the students showed some concern during the test
because they realized they had some weaknesses, specially in the grammar
part, I guess that it had a good backwash effect since it helped us find out what
areas they need to reinforce. This last part I will need to analyze further because
I do not want my class to become a grammar class, we are aiming to develop
general communication skills. I guess it is just a matter of finding the correct
balance between accuracy and fluency.
 Ref lect ion of the un it .

When I first started this unit I thought it would be easier to

design a test, after all I have designed many tests myself, but
reading Arthur Hughes gave me a new perspective on test
designing and test administration.
Concepts like Validity, Reliability and Authenticity were new to
me; however I had a notion of what test should be, now I know in
clearer way how to moderate a test.
But above all, the backwash effect is, perhaps, one of the most
interesting areas of test designing and test administration.
Indubitably, there is an effect on students and teachers during
and after the administration of a test. We see the results and act
according to them, acknowledging this would give us more tools
to create better learning environments and more accurate
evaluation systems for our students.