Teachers’competence in tests construction within blooms taxonomy for effective learning assessment: a case study of Kikuyu district, Kiambu county.

Abstract

A test as an assessment technique is a tool or device that is used to obtain information about achievement, aptitude or intelligence level of learners. This study focused on the competence of secondary school teachers in assessing their students by finding out whether when constructing tests they are guided by the Bloom’s levels of cognitive objectives. The purpose of the study was to find out how adequate the teachers spread their test items to cover the six levels of cognitive objectives that Bloom (1956) identified and were later revised by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001). The study aimed to determine how adequately the test items developed by the teachers cover the lower and higher levels of thinking in regard to the action verbs used in the test items. The study also intended to determine the extent to which school type (National, County, District schools) influence the teachers’ consideration and use of the cognitive objectives in constructing their test items. Four research questions were formulated for the study. The design for the study was a crosssectional survey where a sample was selected from the target population of all the public secondary schools within kikuyu District, the area under study. The researcher conveniently selected one (1) National school out of the two (2) within the area of the study, three (3) County schools out of the five (5) and ten (10) District Schools out of the twenty one (21) within the area of study. A total of fourteen schools were included in the study. From each sampled school at least three (3) teachers were included in the study as respondents during data collection. The main instrument used for data collection was the questionnaire. Teacher made tests containing test items constructed by each of the teachers involved in the study were also used to get the information from the teachers to establish their extent of competence in test construction. Frequency tables, percentages, pie charts, graphs and means were used to help in answering the research questions. The findings revealed that secondary school teachers do not adequately employ the Bloom’s cognitive levels objectives in constructing their test items. It also revealed that teachers do not adequately make use of the action verbs in constructing test items. The findings were similar in all the types of schools. The findings therefore imply that training and retraining of teachers in test construction could help in improving teacher made tests for effective learning assessment; which was the recommendation the researcher made to the Ministry of Education.