Content Validity Study On Writing Testing Of Achievement Test For High School Students

High school achievement test is a type of new evaluation test under the new curriculum reform background, the test results plays a significant role in the eight schools academic evaluation and the colleague’s talent selection. The first indicator which the test should concern is: whether the test content meets the requirements and how well it fits with the requirements according to the new curriculum standard, so it means “content validity” in the testing field.Writing, as a subjective test, which can best demonstrate content validity of the examination. Currently, more and more scholars have done comprehensive and profound research on content validity about different types of writing test and get good results, but few of them are about the writing part of the high school achievement test. First of all, this paper reviews the previous relevant studies about writing test and content validity. Then the author introduces the theories related to the validity, communicative testing, writing test and the achievement test, which are the theoretical basis of this paper. After that, the author randomly selected 10 sets of English examination paper of 2012 National high school achievement test, and chooses the guided writing part as the study object. This paper adopts the method used in previous studies to collect and analyze the available data, finally, gets the results. According to the results, the author concludes that: all the English writing tests in English examination paper of 2012 well reflect the curriculum standards and the principle of communicative language testing theory, they have high content validity, the topics are close to students’ life and social reality; the genres are rich and writing prompts are various. However, there still exits some problems: writing genres are almost practical writing and argumentative writing, the topics are old and often repeat. Topics of level 8th haven’t been involved, some examination papers give too many details in prompt part. Based on these results, the author gives some suggestions and advice to English writing proposition and teaching in the high school. Finally, the author reflects the inadequacies in this study and directions to further research in this area are proposed.