Testing practices of senior secondary school teachers in the Ashanti region of Ghana

Abstract

The study aimed at finding out whether Senior Secondary School teachers in the Ashanti Region of Ghana followed the basic principles in their testing practices. It also sought to find out whether pre-service training in testing contributes to competence in actual testing practice. Cluster and simple random sampling techniques were adopted to select 265 teachers of Mathematics, Integrated Science and English Language in 26 Senior Secondary Schools for the study. Eight research questions guided the study. A 52-item questionnaire and a 17-item observation guide were used for data collection. The reliability coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.70. The study showed that to a great extent, teachers followed the basic principles in test construction, administration and scoring. Teachers applied seven out of 10 principles in test construction, 12 out of 18 principles in test administration and six out of nine principles in test scoring. Also, teachers reported they used both norm-referenced and criterion-referenced approaches in their test-score interpretation. Again, the findings indicated that pre-service instruction in educational measurement had a positive impact on actual testing practice, although the impact was quite subtle. It was recommended that since competence in assessment is key to teacher effectiveness, every teacher must be given formal training in educational measurement and evaluation during pre-service training. Again, the teacher training universities in Ghana should accentuate the practical classroom aspects of the testing principles in their educational measurement courses to help teachers practicalise the theoretical knowledge they acquire.