Development and Validation of Contextualized Reading Test Material for Senior High School Students

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Reading is an essential part of a student's learning. It is basic to all learning and this ability is highly useful in the practical situations of life (Fazal et.al 2015) and an essential tool for knowledge transfer and the habit of reading is an academic activity that increases skills in reading strategies. Identifying which skills of reading hinders the students to understand the selection, materials or even instruction, is beneficial both to students and teachers. Creating a reading test material helps the teachers to identify the needs of the students for reading. Test materials have a vital role in assessing the teaching-learning process and is helpful in identifying the skills of the students to be developed.

METHODS

The design and development research design was used by Richey & Klein (2007, p.1). Grade 12 students from HUMSS, GAS, STEM, SMAW, and EIM at Gen, Juan Castaneda Senior High School were the subjects. The reading test materials comprised speed and accuracy, vocabulary, and reading comprehension with 50-items each. Speed and accuracy items were localized while vocabulary and reading comprehension tests were contextualized. The subjects took the test and retest, then was validated through the use of spearman-rho

RESULTS

The major parts of the developed reading test material were reading fluency, vocabulary and reading comprehension. Localization and contextualization of the reading test material were used. The following process was done; identification of test part and core subject and specialized subjects was done first, gathering of materials for the localization and contextualization followed, evaluation of vocabulary by the subject teachers, pilot test, and analysis of reliability test. The speed and accuracy test for EIM was not reliable. Vocabulary tests for EIM and GAS were reliable which was opposite to the result of the vocabulary tests for SMAW, HUMSS, and STEM. Reading comprehension tests were all reliable for GAS, HUMSS, STEM, EIM except for SMAW.

DISCUSSIONS

The results showed that there is a need for vocabulary development of the students. The socio-cultural aspects of the students should also be taken into consideration. The results of the study suggested that the subjects of the study need some honing in their vocabulary through reading and that the test material needed to be revised using another type of tests for vocabulary. Further note that some of the respondents were not familiar with the history of the local of the research.