| If an examination is a measurement, test paper is the measure tool. Accuracy of the measurement is directly related to the accuracy of the measurement tools. If the test paper can not test the true language ability of students, not only cherish teaching time is wasted, but also right feedback for teaching and learning cannot be reached, which will bring students and teachers unnecessary psychological pressure. Therefore, papers from three middle schools in Xuzhou were chosen to investigate the reliability and validity of test paper especially internal consistency reliability and content validity. During this process, the following questions will be studied:1. How about the reliability and validity of Xuzhou junior middle school English midterm test?2. Which item should be changed to further improve the reliability and validity of Xuzhou junior middle school English midterm test?Take 2013-2014 First Semester English Midterm test of grade eight as example, the thesis will study and evaluate the reliability and validity of junior school English testing in Xuzhou; find out the existing problems of the test on reliability and validity aspects; analyze the causes and put forward improvement proposals. Research subjects are 100 pieces of grade eight midterm English papers. By quantitative and qualitative research methods, the samples were analyzed with the help of SPSS 16.0 software and online Flesch Reading Readability Calculator. The study checks the accordance between testing purpose and curriculum criteria; under the testing theory, analyzes content validity of each item of the paper by comparing the test to text books; calculates a coefficient of internal consistency by SPSS 16.0 and contrasts to norm table of Cronbach’s alpha to explore internal consistency reliability of the test. Through one semester’s study, the questions were answered.1. Cronbach’s alpha of the test is 0.931 above 0.8, which indicates that the internal consistency reliability of the test is relatively high. Cloze enjoys the lowest internal consistency reliability, but deleting any component makes the whole reliability down. Each item of the test enjoys a proper content validity, but some shortcomings are still existed. The percentage distribution of subjective and objective items is unreasonable. The option of subjective items coming from textbook is a little high.2. In order to further enhance the reliability and validity of test papers, the following five points need to be improved, such as balancing the proportion of subjective and objective items; decreasing the ratio of items cited from textbooks; increasing the proportion of multiple-choice questions based on communicative situation; increasing proportion of cloze questions based on sentence and discourse level; decreasing the proportion of reading comprehension questions based on specific details finding.Although samples of the study are limited, the data and study methods are scientific. Thus it can provide a reference for the similar research. In addition it will be helpful to improve English tests quality, enhance teachers’ ability to explain test results and get useful information from the test results,thereby improving the quality of teaching. |
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