Evaluating Ethiopian General Secondary Education Certifcate Amharic Examinations Using Bloom`s Cognitive Taxonomy & Their Impact on the teaching-Learning Processes

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the compatibility/relationship between the Amharic language completion test of the general Secondary Education Certificate education of Ethiopia and the educational objectives of the cognitive category/domain, the level of relevance and the impact it may have on the teaching-learning process. For these purpose three years 270 questions of the final exams were evaluated according to the matching method used by Weir et al. (1990), Alderson et al.(1995). The participating experts are four, two of whom have master's degrees in curriculum and teaching, one in educational psychology and assessment and evaluation, and one in teaching Amharic. More information from the officials of the examination agency and Amharic language test preparation experts were also collected by interviewing them.  And then, the collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Especially as the analysis of the results of the classification conducted by the experts showed, the relationship between the questions of the tests and the educational objectives of the Bloom`s Cognitive category was found to be negative. That is, firstly, all the objectives that should be represented in the tests were not represented, and the representation that was represented was questionable. Second, the results of the study showed that the main aspects of the course (application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation) that should be represented by many questions are represented by less than 10% of the questions in the exams. On the other hand, knowledge (recalling, literal Comprehension) that is not (and should not be) given attention in the education policy documents were represented in more than 90% of the questions. This can have a negative impact on the teaching and learning process, which may make students not interested in applying the skills that are presented in their textbooks, which require applying, analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating and higher thinking skills especially related to fields those looking for skills to practice writing, discussing, debating, speaking etc. It encourages them not to do the exercises that need to do voluntarily. The implication of this is that, firstly, the question makers/writers they choose do not have the ability/knowledge to come up with/write questions that consider these objectives; Second, the test preparation capacity building training that is frequently given by the agency to the experts for different types of education has resulted in the desired change in the experts and the questions that the exam organizers (question writers) have not been able to show the direction in which these objectives are represented according to the policy and the attention given to the language education. From the study based on the findings, the following comments were made; first, the selection criteria of the exam organizers and experts should be revised to enable the selection of appropriate experts, second. If it is possible to facilitate provide lessons and training to the exam organizers and exam preparation experts to ensure that the exams will reflect the objectives the syllabi & textbooks in line with Cognitive Category.   Third, for the occurrence of the problems one of the reasons is that the test is offered only by multiple choice  method and asking for high level cognitive skills in the multiple choice  test may require different experience and skills, if a system should be developed where the tests prepared are not only multiple choice method as is being done in many other countries.