[[alternative]]Appreciation test research —The example of the 2003 Taipei County junior high school art class entrance exam.

Abstract

[[abstract]]This research aims to study of the items of the 2003 Taipei County junior high school art class entrance exam. A series of analyses were done on the test items, the testing data ,and the interview data from the teachers and the subject students. The purpose was to analyze those data, gather some relevant opinions and reactions to serve as the basis for future test-item design. Some important conclusions were reached as follows: I.Item design and the educational concepts of art: We took into account the testing purposes, the choosing of the test types, and the variety of the test items. However, the validity planning and the test-item screening were not consistent with the standardized testing procedures. This paper used the rational of aesthetic education and curriculum standard as bases. The purpose of the paper mainly focused on the aesthetic perception and the art knowledge, The proportion of art knowledge items was higher because of the evaluation of students’ ability in thinking/cognition, and the importance of cultural issues. II.The analysis of test items: On the whole, the difficulty of the test items were of medium-low and the item discrimination index is medium. Most of the test items were consistent with the standard of item analysis. The test items were co-designed with illustrations. All these were in line with the content of aesthetic education. This test had already included the comprehensive version of curriculum standards. It had good content validity; however, the content validity would have been even better if we could have focus on material and subject matter of aesthetic perception. As for the internal consistency reliability coefficient, it was not high. On the overall score distribution, the scores of scores of all students was slightly higher than the norm. III.Responses: Most of the interviewed teachers believed that aesthetic perception was the most suitable testing content while art knowledge was not so much recommended. Nine teachers were against using multiple true-false items while five teachers considered the number of testing items too few. Although the difficult testing items of this paper were only few; however, most of the more difficult testing items have made a great impact on both teachers and students’ feelings. Lastly, the researcher made some suggestions to some future testing applications of the appreciation and some relevant research.