How to Test Speaking Skills in Japan

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Chapter 2: Embrace testing

some maturity and discipline problems, this may have an adverse im pact on test reliability Reflecting on these questions with regards to your tests will steer you in a very positive direction Notice how they all exemplify common themes of clarity , transparency , and consistency Internalize these simple, common sense ideas and live up to them as best you can The more you do, the more confident you’ll feel that you’re doing your very best to administer highly reliable exams Validity A valid test measures what it is supposed to measure (Nation, 2013) This is pretty much the central concept in all of language testing (Fulcher & Davidson, 2007) There are entire books focused on just this one topic This is because when you break it down, there are, in fact, actually many kinds of validity: you have face-validity, con struct validity, content validity, and criterion-related validity Then there is predictive validity, concurrent validity, and test validity Oh, and don’t forget about convergent validity and uh discrimi nant validity Zzzzzzzz OH! Sorry, I dozed off there for a moment :-) Thing is, there are so many different facets of this concept that it is all to easy to lose sight of its simple and profound elegance

Test

Discriminant

Convergent

Predictive

Content

Face

Construct

Criterion-related

Concurrent

Validity is a gem-like, multi-faceted concept