CONSTRUCTING ENGLISH READING COMPREHENSION ABILITY TEST FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS BY USING AN IRT MODEL
Abstract
- Although the mastery of reading comprehension in English is becoming more important day by day, a large number of students in Myanmar seem to suffer from poor reading comprehension. Appropriate assessment is the essential to assess the English reading comprehension ability of students so as to provide them with necessary feedbacks and instructions. So, the main aim of this study is to construct the standardized English Reading Comprehension Ability Test (ERCAT) for Myanmar High School students. In this study, descriptive survey design and quantitative approach was used. Snow and the RAND Reading Group’s (2002) Framework of Reading Comprehension was used as the primary framework for constructing the test in this study. Barrett’s Taxonomy of Reading Comprehension (Barrett, 1976) was used to define the cognitive demand level of the tasks included in the ERCAT. Initial item pool of the test consists of 74 items related to 25 reading passages of various lengths. Then, the pilot testing was conducted with 316 high school students from B.E.H.S Intagaw, Bago. Some items were revised and eliminated according to IRT calibration. The final version of the ERCAT included 40 items related to 15 reading passages. Then, as the field testing, the data was collected from 1026 high school students by using stratified random sampling technique. The results revealed that all items’ difficulties and discriminations were between the acceptable ranges. The empirical reliability of the ERCAT is 0.9354 and the maximum test information of the test I (θ) was 19 at θ = 0.25. The test had smaller standard error across the ability scale from -1.25 to +1.75 and thus, the test was informative for the average ability range as it was predicted.
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Year
- 2022
Author
-
Wint Wah Wah Tun
Subject
- Educational Psychology, Curriculum and Methodology
Publisher
- Myanmar Academy of Arts and Science (MAAS)