Exploring the English Achievement Assessment of Junior High School Students

Abstract

In the past years, most traditional item analysis only analyses difficulty and discrimination of each item, and test analysis only analyses overall test reliability and validity. As a result, EFL educators are lack of information on students’ response data for both students’ learning styles and item types in test questions preparation. Thus, the study presents the various item types of the English achievement assessment of Junior High School Students in Taiwan, and illustrates the various learning styles of the EFL students. The participants were randomly selected from one thousand four hundred and forty two junior high school students, who participated in Taiwan Assessment of Student Achievement in Junior High School English (TASA) held by National Academy for Educational Research (NAER). The data was analyzed based on the dichotomous scoring and the Student-Problem Chart Analysis. The result of Caution Index for Students shows that high achievement students account for one third of the sample students. However, the other students were classified as learning abnormality, inattention learning, and lack of learning adequateness, insufficiency learning, and lack of academic ability. Also, the result of caution index for problems shows that the test items of English Achievement Assessment were capable of measuring the English achievements of junior high school student and it also can differentiate high achievers from the low achiever in Taiwan. To improve the further test question preparation, only partial revisions are suggested for National Academy for Educational Research (NAER).