ANALYZING THE CONTENT VALIDITY OF FINAL EXAMS OF THE COURSE COMMUNICATIVE ENGLISH SKILLS (ENLA 1011): THE CASE OF DEBARK UNIVERSITY FROM 2018-2020

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to analyze the content validity of final exams of the course communicative English skills administered in Debark University from 2018-2020; additionally, it identifies the relationship between the exam items and the learning outcomes of the course, it reveals the adequacy of the representation of each item or content in the exam, discuses the applicability of Blooms Taxonomy cognitive domain in the sample exam. The researcher applied mixed research design and to achieve the objectives, final exams for first year students were selected because the course is given for all first year students. The analysis focused on skills, linguistic elements and cognitive elements and was delimited conceptually, geographically, methodologically and periodically. Conceptually, this study focused on analyzing the content validity of final exams of the course communicative English skills (Enla1011). Geographically, it covered the communicative English sample final exams at Debark University. Periodically, it intended to analyze the three consecutive years from 2018-2020. Methodologically, the study would be employed descriptive research design; mixed (qualitative and quantitative) research approach; census survey and purposive sampling technique for course-book and sample exams respectively. Then, the contents of the course-book and sample exam papers designed and used as sources of data and were analyzed in order to get the required data for the study. After the necessary data had been obtained, Charles coefficient Pearson correlation formula was used to determine the extent to which the two observations (Course-book/syllabus and sample exam contents) were related or not. The result of the study showed that the content of sample test papers did not adequately represent the coverage of the course-book. Therefore, unbalanced linguistic elements were identified. The degree of relationship between the course-book and sample exam papers was found to be 0.12. For example, listening and writing skills were not proportionally incorporated in the sample exam papers. Thus, it was concluded that final exams of the course communicative English skills in Debark University were poor at content validity. It is also observed that content relationship was given more attention than cognitive relationship between the syllabus and the sample exams. In addition to this, redundancy of exam questions and inadequacy of exam items were observed during the analysis.