Consultant’s Note : V.S. Misra

The Council for Indian School Certificate Examinations in collaboration with the Institute of Psychological and Educational Measurement (IPEM) has offering the facility to students in Schools under their programme to appear for the Academic Aptitude and Achievement Test(s) – AAT in addition to regular school examinations. The academic aptitude testing programme currently being offered by the Council for ISCE developed by the IPEM, may be described as a programme for the benefit of the students of age groups 14, 16 and 18 (corresponding to classes VII/VIII, IX/X and XI/XII) of the English Medium Schools within the country and abroad. These tests according to the two organisations are intended to provide helpful information to the students and their parents and teachers about the students which may not be available in the regular school programmes.

In several advanced countries nationally standardized tests have been developed in response to secondary schools to measure skills which educational scientists and psychologists consider crucial to the total educational development of the student. The performance of the student reveals how well the student has mastered those skills and how well he is prepared to profit from the instructions at the next higher level of education.

Since such useful measuring instruments have not been developed to suit Indian conditions, the Institute of Psychological and Educational Measurement, in partnership with the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE), has begun developing such tests since 1996 for the benefit of the students of English medium schools affiliated to the Council. These tests are called the Academic Aptitude and Achievement Tests (AAT).

Objectives of AAT :

The first and most important purpose of these tests is to enable teachers and school officials to become more quickly and dependably acquainted with the educational accomplishments and abilities of each pupil, in order that instruction and guidance may be better adapted o his individual needs, interests and abilities.

The second major purpose of these tests is to supply the teacher, counsellor, pupil and parent with important information needed for effective educational guidance. By early identification of talents or limitations, the test results will make possible earlier and more effective planning towards appropriate educational and vocational goals.

The third major purpose of the tests is to provide the school official with an objective and dependable basis for the evaluation of school and class achievement.

These tests are meant to provide aid to the school to fit the instructions to the needs of the pupils, aid to measure students growth from year to year, aid to the teacher and parent in student guidance and means of learning how well the students of a school compare with those in other schools, on a national basis.

Goals of the AAT Research Report

The appraisal of the AAT instruments would enable us to understand the precision of the tests. In this context, we have arrived at some of the issues on which we would focus as mentioned below :-

• To explore whether there was gender differences on the Aptitude and Achievement tests.
• To explore whether the tests discriminated between higher and lower classes.
• To explore whether the obtained distribution of scores conform to the ideal ones.
• To understand the relationship between verbal and quantitative sections for different subject matter tests at different classes.
• To determine the nature of the test(s) as power or speed test.
• To derive the reliability – validity of the test(s).

The purpose of the research was an appraisal of the Academic Aptitude Test and Achievement Test (AAT).

Sample :

The test has been administered to a large sample (N = 6029) of students of I.S.C.E. schools from classes VII to XII.

Findings :

The exploratory research findings indicated that there was no gender-bias and the test positively discriminated between the higher and the lower classes. The findings also indicated that the obtained mean-scores were relatively close to the ideal ones. That means, scores are relatively close to the normal curve. Further, it also, means that the test measures the average human ability. That is, the items or questions tend to provide an average item scores, which is also an index of average difficulty for students. This also tends to discriminate the students into different grades on the basis of obtained AAT scores. The inter-correlations between the Aptitude and the Achievement Tests indicated that the Aptitude Tests can be administered as a "Link-test" to predict on the basis of the students ability to accomplish in a specified area of academics and to the extent they would be successful in the specified area of the future learning situations.

Conclusions and Suggestions :

The following inferences may be drawn and suggestions made on the basis of the analyses :

• There was no gender-bias in the test.
• The test positively discriminated higher class from lower class.
• The ideal statistics and the observed ones were not very different. However, the general inference may be that the difficulty of the test should be slightly reduced, in other words, the items with lesser difficulty level should be incorporated in the test. This is more needed in the quantitative reasoning test.
• There is a need to assess whether the difficulty of the test was due to the deterioration of standards or due to intrinsic inordinate item difficulties.
• It seems that number of items were slightly greater than what the ability level of the students demanded.
• The grade-distribution seems to suggest that they approximate the distributions generally observed in the Council’s examinations.
• The reliability of the test was found to be satisfactory. Since sometimes attempt to improve reliability may adversely affect content validity, there is hardly any need to improve test reliability any further.
• The Scaled Scores, Percentile Ranks and the Standard Error of the two sections should somehow be incorporated in the student’s result sheet, because the scores in any test are not perfectly accurate and one may easily get a wrong impression that they are so.
• Statistical techniques like the factor and cluster analyses should be conducted to find out to what extent the desired constructs are being measured by the test.
• Attempts should be made to develop a test of pure factors.