Development of Electronic Test to Measure Students’ English Abilities of Rajamangala University of Technology Phra Nakhon

Abstract

The purposes of this research were to build and develop a standardized test used to measure English abilities compliant with the curriculum of the fourth-year students of Rajamangala University of Technology Phra Nakhon. There were two groups of the students, namely, the first group which consisted of 57 students who took the traditional pilot paper test, and the latter which consisted of 63 students taking the electronic test via the Internet. The other purposes were to find out the students/users’ attitudes and satisfaction towards the use of the electronic test, and to obtain a computer program prototype for measuring English abilities. The results were as follows: 1. The item analysis of the pilot paper test revealed that there were 64 items of appropriate difficulty index and discrimination power, whereas that of the electronic test revealed that only 56 items had appropriate difficulty index and discrimination power. Even though the latter test had been improved, the accepted items were fewer. This led to the assumption that the characteristics of doing an electronic test affected students’ decisions and made them guess more than when they took a paper test. 2. The questionnaires analysis of students’ satisfaction of using the electronic test program to measure their English abilities revealed that the overall arithmetic mean was 75.72. The highest scored item of 87.59 percent was “I think this e-test program is useful”; and the lowest scored item of 66.21 percent was “I think the screen format is interesting”. Moreover, there were 11 users who showed their positive opinions towards the e-test program which was 18.97 percent of the latter group.