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What are The Factors Affecting Validity
Describe 10 Factors Affecting Validity
The main factors affecting the validity of a test are:
- Factors in the Test Itself
- Functioning Content and Teaching Procedure
- Factors in Test Administration and Scoring
- Factors in Pupils’ Response
- Nature of the Group and the Criterion.
- Length of the test: Typically, a test is a sampling of a large number of questions. The test’s validity will be impacted if it is too brief to be a representative one. The validity and reliability of a test are both improved by homogeneous lengthening.
- Unclear direction: The validity will tend to decrease if the student’s instructions on how to react to the items, whether it is okay to guess, and how to record the responses are unclear.
- Reading vocabulary and sentence structures which are too difficult: The test’s complex phrase structure and vocabulary may not accurately reflect the many components of student performance, reducing the validity.
- Inappropriate level of difficulty of the test items: The validity of the tool will be impacted if the test items are too challenging. For instance, failing to match the level of difficulty required by the learning outcome would reduce the validity of criterion-referenced assessments.
- Poorly constructed test items: The test items that unintentionally hint at the solution tend to gauge students’ observance of cues as well as the factors of student performance that ultimately influence validity.
- Ambiguity: Statements in test items that are unclear might be misunderstood, given different interpretations, and cause confusion. Sometimes it can make better students more confused than poorer students, which causes products to be discriminated against in a negative way. As a result, the test’s validity is diminished.
- Test items inappropriate for the outcomes being measured: Many times, we use exam formats that are solely suitable for testing factual information to attempt to gauge certain sophisticated sorts of performance, understanding, reasoning, and competence. This has an impact on the outcomes and distorts the validity.
- Improper arrangement of items: The test’s components are often ordered in order of increasing difficulty, starting with the easiest. The pupils can spend too much time on these and not get to other questions that they might quickly answer if the challenging questions are put early in the test. Additionally, the ineffective organisation may affect the validity by demotivating students.
- Identifiable pattern of answers: When students recognise the systematic pattern of the right response (such as TT.F.F. or ABCD, ABCD), they may deftly estimate the right responses, which will have an impact on the validity.
