Appraising pre-service EFL teachers’ assessment in language testing course using revised bloom’s taxonomy

Abstract

The teachers need to be conceived as a “change agent” and not as a mere transmitter of knowledge and culture. In developing countries like Iran, one of the most significant concerns in the field of teachers’ education is efficiency of pre-service programs. To this aim, the current descriptive-evaluative study intended to describe the state of pre-service teachers’ assessment in the field of language testing by (a) examining the exam questions to find out whether they are aligned with curriculum objectives and syllabus (content validity, (b) exploring whether they take care of higher order cognitive processes and (c) finding what combinations of cognitive process levels and knowledge types in Revised Bloom's Taxonomy are prevalent in the questions. The results exhibited an unbalanced coverage of content in exams. Also the questions were found to be inadequate in terms of measuring complex cognitive skills (Analyze and Evaluate); Remember and Understand domains take up 91.6 % of all questions and no item was found for Create. Three combinations of cognitive process level and knowledge type was dominant in the data set: (1) Remember Factual Knowledge, (2) Understand Conceptual Knowledge, and (3) Apply Procedural Knowledge. These associations confirm the Anderson and Krathwohl’s (2001) proposition.