A Validity Study Of Five-out-of-Seven In English Reading Comprehension Tests For Senior High School Students

This thesis is dedicated to studying the validity of Five-out-of-Seven(FOOS) in English reading comprehension tests in Senior High School in Jiangxi Province. At present, there are many studies on the validity of reading comprehension, most of which focuses on the multiple choice questions and short-answer questions. These afford solid and stable theoretical bases as well as vast case analyses for the present study. However, few studies are concerned with the particular reading item type: Five out of Seven(FOOS). In Jiangxi province, after designing its own test paper for ten years, started in 2015 to adopt the National Volume(I), a nation-wide used test paper for National Matriculation English Test(NMET). Compared to the previous independent proposition, most test items of English exam for Jiangxi province has been changed. Notably, FOOS which takes up 10 points has appeared in the part of reading comprehension test. Therefore, the number of the reading passages has increased from four to five. To investigate the validity of FOOS, this study administers some tests among senior middle school students and carries out interviews among the test takers. The research questions in this study are as follows: 1)What is the content validity of FOOS? 2) What construct is FOOS test aimed at?This thesis bases itself on language testing theories(LTT) and validation theories,both of which provide theoretical backgrounds for defining the FOOS validity and offer specific guidance for the validation process.The research methods mainly include Syllabus Analysis, data analysis and Students' interview. 106 students at grade two from a senior middle school in Nanchang are selected as subjects and took the Mid-term exam on April 28th2015,and another test, which consists of three FOOSs two weeks later, on May 15 th 2015.And then the next day, four students of them were invited to do 20-minute-interview concerning the strategies of completing FOOS. Quantitative data were analyzed by SPSS 16.0. The analysis of syllabus and interviews were mainly logic analysis based on the research questions emerged from the qualitative data.As the results of the study show, 1) The FOOS in Senior High School has well met the requirements as the two syllabuses and it has reached a relatively high content validity, with unbiased materials and moderate length. And the Cronbach's AlphaCoefficient among passage A, B, C and Mid-exam is comparatively high; 2) The scores of students on FOOS were analyzed by SPSS ideally correlates with multiple-choice reading item, grammar filling and writing, especially with the M-C reading and the writing part, all of which exert great effect on the total score; 3)From the students' interview, the FOOS does examine the following language abilities:understanding the main idea of the passage, understanding the basic structure of the passage, and weaving together ideas into the content.As the validity of FOOS is testified by the way of combing the quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, some implications for the design of FOOS and its teaching-and-learning are put forward. Considering various subjective and objective conditions in the actual operation, this study still has certain limitations. First of all,this study uses only 106 samples, and the size of this sample might potentially affect the results of this study. And the study materials of FOOS is from Simulation tests, the validity of these might not able to stand for the validity of all FOOS used in Senior High School, which might have lead to a different result. What's more, the participators of this research are from an ordinary high school, and students' reading ability is relatively not very high, and their level of reading comprehension may affect the result, and the results of interview are affected by their different cognitive competence and psychological quality. Regardless of all the limitation, the author hopes that this research can raise more concerns on the validity of FOOS in Senior High School, and so more scientifically comprehensive researches will be done in the future.