In the academic year of 1997/1998, the Department of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia, DEPDIKBUD R.I., decided to include English as one of the subjects assessed in the national final learning evaluation of the vocational high schooI/SMK, which consisted of six groups from different background covering more than a hundred study programs. Known as EBTANAS-SMK, the implementation of the decision did not take the differences among the six groups into consideration. This was obvious from the use of a single English test document for all SMK lest lakers, disregarding the ESP they had learned. The problem was, **How could the EBTANAS test paper, consisting of 50 to 60 lest items, exemplify the compulsory learning objectives and materials stated in the curriculum of each group?"
This study tried lo describe the extent to which the EBTANAS-SMK test items represented the required materials and the instructional objectives of the English curriculum of SMK, Business and Management Group/SMEA. The degree of the representativeness, the content validity, was classified into four categories: very high (85-100%), high (70-84%), moderate (55-69%), and low (less than 55%). The data were all of the English EBTANAS -SMK test items, three years in a row from 1998 to 2000. They were analyzed by comparing the theme and the objective of each item with the curricular materials and objectives, which were elaborated into 41 compulsory themes and 26 specific instructional objectives/SIOs.
The analysis revealed that the percentage of the test items of the English EBTANAS-SMK OF 1998, 1999, and 2000 relevant to SMEA curricular materials was 50%, 48.3%, and 53% respectively; whereas the coverage of the themes was only 19.5%, 26.8%, and 22% respectively. From the standpoint of instructional objectives, the percentage of the representativeness of SIOs in the English EBTANAS-SMK test papers of 1998, 1999, and 2000 was 28%, 35%, and 18.3% correspondingly. In the meantime, the coverage of the skills was only 50% because listening skills and speaking skills were not assessed in the English EBTANAS-SMK although those skills are staled explicitly in ihe SMEA basic outlines of the leaching programs/GBPP of SMEA as the ultimate goals of learning English.
The results showed that the content validity of the English EBTANAS-SMK was low for the test takers from the Business and management Group/SMEA. |