Problems Formulation Problems Limitation

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B. Problems Formulation

The problems of this research are as follows. 1. How does the national final examination year 2007 for vocational high schools meet the criteria of face validity? 2. How does the reading section of the national final examination year 2007 for vocational high schools meet the criteria of content validity?

C. Problems Limitation

The scope of education includes many formal education levels starting from kindergarten, elementary school, junior and senior high school, to university. National final examination is administered for all of those education levels excluding the last one. However, this research limits its study on observing the national final examination for vocational high schools. Vocational high school is, in some aspects of learning, equivalent to senior high school. The researcher chooses vocational high school on the reason that it is the last and highest level of education whose students’ graduation depends on the government’s policy. In addition, position of English subject in vocational high school level is rather more significant compared to the one that is taught in those of lower levels, even to the one taught in senior high schools. Vocational high school students are expected to achieve the informational level of literacy, by which they are able to access knowledge with their language competence. English teaching in vocational high schools prepares the students mainly for their working world, and secondly for entering the next education level. 7 National final examination is categorized as an achievement test. Thus, this research focuses its study on this type of test, among other types of language tests. Aspect of language test that this research investigates is the validity of the national final examination. Validity of a language test has four facets, namely face validity, content validity, construct validity, and criterion-referenced validity. However, the last two facets of validity, construct validity and criterion- referenced validity, are excluded from this research due to this research limitation of time and source. Anastasi 1982: 136 as cited by Weir 1990: 26 stated that “face validity is not validity in the technical sense.” Face validation is significant in that it pertains to whether or not the test “looks valid” to those who deal with the test. The researcher performs the analysis of face validation of both listening and reading sections. However, content validation is only performed to the reading section due to the unavailability of the audio cassette. In addition, construct and criterion-referenced validation fail to be done in this research. According to Bachman and Cohen 1998: 50, construct validation deals with the “judgmental and empirical justifications supporting the inferences made from test scores”. Bachman and Palmer 1996: 21 also mention that construct validation is related to the “meaningfulness and appropriateness” of the researcher’s interpretations relevant to the actual test scores. Bachman 1990: 248 mentions that criterion- referenced validity deals with demonstrating “a relationship between test scores and some criterion which is believed as an indicator of the ability 8 tested”. However, this research is not provided with the actual test scores, and thus excludes the two validation processes from its investigation. The writer chooses the document of national final examination for vocational high school on English subject that has been tested to the students in 2007. The examination was administered a year after School-based Curriculum was put into practice, yet it represented as a national final examination which followed Competency-based Curriculum.

D. Objectives of the Research