Background of Study INTRODUCTION

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of Study

English is the foreign language in Indonesia. It has an important role in any sphere of activities especially in the term of education. The government of Indonesia and the private institution are struggling to enhance teaching and learning process of English. Education is an important aspect in teaching and learning process. Generally, there are some aspects which can not be separated each other. They are the teachers, the students, the materials, the methods and the mediums of teaching and learning. The teachers usually make the lesson plan to give the materials to their students before teaching and learning activity. They also use the method to conduct it and they decide some mediums to know the result of their teaching and learning activities. One of the mediums is evaluation. According to Kenneth D. Hopkins, “evaluation is the process of education depends extensively on assessment and measurement and on a related procedure.” 1 While Gronlund said in his book that: “Evaluation is the systematic process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting information to determine the extent to which pupils are achieving instructional objectives.” 2 Therefore evaluation is not the only way to judge whether something or someone is good or bad, but it also focuses on how to use the data as a means for future direction of classroom practice such as to develop the teaching and learning activities. In the effort of evaluation about teaching and learning process, teachers need an instrument to assess the students’ performance. The writer considers that the test is one of the instruments of evaluation. 1 Kenneth D. Hopkins, Educational and Psychological Measurement and Evaluation, 8 th ed., Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998, p. 6. 2 Gronlund, N.E., Measurement and Evaluation in Teaching, 5 th ed., New York: Macmillan Publishing co., Inc., 1985 P.5. 10 Test is an important instrument not only does it allow teachers to keep track of the progress of their students, but it also enables them to measure their own successes and failures in the classroom and let the teachers know when lesson plan must be modified to meet the students’ unforeseen problems. 3 The teacher can not only measure their students abilities by test, but also evaluate the method or the program used in the teaching and learning progress. So the teacher should have an accurate data and instrument to get the good quality test, because the characteristic of the test would influence the result of teaching and learning process. If the test was valid, reliable, and practice; it could be a good test. But usually some of the teachers didnt consider it. In the school program, usually there are formative test and summative test. Formative test is intended to monitor learning progress during the instruction and to provide continuous feedback to both pupil and teacher concerning learning successes and failures. Summative test is intended to show the standard which the students have now reached in relation to other students at the same stage. The main purpose of it is grading or the certification of the pupil achievement. 4 Both of them would influence the success of teaching and learning activity, so the good test should be learned as well as possible. It is generally found that sometimes the test items are not coherence with the materials that have studied or with the curriculum. So, the test can not be representative of the instruction content. In other word, the test has a poor content validity. Consequently, the test which is designed to measure the students proficiency is not appropriate. Based on the reality above, the writer would like to analyze the content validity of summative test. It is conducted to know the relevance of the test items with the syllabus. She gives the title of this Study; An Analysis on 3 Rebecca M. Valette and Edward David A. Foreign languages and English as Second Language, USA: HB. Javanovich, 1977, p. 111 4 Drs. Wilmar Tinambunan, Evaluation of Student Achievement, Jakarta: Depdiknas, 1988, p. 7-9. 11 Content Validity of the Summative Test at the Second Year Student of SMPN 86 Cilandak, Jakarta.

B. Limitation of the Problem