7.1 Factors Affecting Validity:

1. Unclear Directions:

Directions that do not clearly indicate to the pupil how to respond to the items, whether it is permissible to guess, and how to record the asnwers will tend to reduce validity.

2. Reading vocabulary and sentence structure too difficult:

Vocabulary and sentence structure that is too complicated for the pupils taking the test will result in the test's measuring reading comprehension and aspects of intelligence, which will distort the meaning of the test results.

3. Inappropriate level of difficulty of the test items:

In norm-referenced test, items that are too easy or too difficult will not provide reliable discriminations among pupils and will therefore lower validity. In criterion-referenced tests, the failure to match the difficulty specified by the learning outcome will lower validity.

4. Poorly constructed test items:

Test items that unintentionally provide clues to the answer will tend to measure the pupils alertness in detecting clues as well as those aspects of pupil performance that the test is intended to measure.

5. Ambiguity:

Ambiguous statements in test items contribute to misinterpretations and confusion. Ambiguity sometimes confuses the better pupils more than it does the poor pupils, causing the items to discriminate in a negative direction.

6. Test items inappropriate for the outcomes being measured:

Attempting to measure understanding, thinking skills, and other complex types of achievement with test forms that are appropriate only for measuring factual knowledge will invalidate the results.

7. Test too short:

A test is only a sample of the many questions that might be asked. If a test is too short to provide a representative sample of the performance we are interested in, its validity will suffer accordingly.8. Improper arrangement of items: Test items are typically arranged in order of difficulty, with the easiest items first. Placing difficult Test items are difficulty with the easiest items early in the test may cause pupils to spend too items early in the test much time on these and prevent them from reaching much time of the items they could easily answer. Imroper arrangement items the co may also influence validity by having a detrimental ALSO TO Tence affect on pupil motivation. This influence is likely to be affect on push m strongest with young pupils.

9. Identifiable pattern of answers:

Placing correct answers in some systematic pattern (e.g., T, T, F, F, or A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D) will Mittern enable pupils to guess the answers to some items more enable pur the easily, and this will lower validity.