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Survey of teachers' attitude to the validity of instruments used for continuous assessment of basic education in north central geo-political zone of Nigeria

Continuous assessment (CA) is applied at all levels of education in the Nigerian school system but its implementation particularly at basic education levels is still fraught with hiccups. At federal level, attempts are being made to harmonize the implementation strategies for CA and particularly test development procedures to improve the validity of the instruments used by teachers for assessing learning, but the actualization remains an issue for perturbation. This survey sought to explore the attitude of basic education teachers towards establishing the validity of the instruments applied for continuous assessment of learners. Three research questions and two hypotheses guided the study. The multistage stratified random sampling procedure was adopted to select a sample of 1,500 teachers from three States of the North Central geo-political zone plus the Federal Capital Territory. A researcher-developed 25-item structured Likert scale was validated through expert consensus-based appraisal and used for data collection. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics for answering research questions and ANOVE and Phi correlation for testing the hypothesis at the 0.05 alpha. The results show that most of the professionally qualified teachers are sensitive to the relevance of validity for any test that will produce useful results. Nonetheless, only a negligible proportion of teachers irrespective of sex and level of educational qualification actually bothered to establish the validity of the instruments they use for obtaining CA scores. Findings from the study reflect the inevitable gap between policy prescription and its implementation. The dynamics of politics coupled with the diversity of ethnic nationalities and the associated multi-lingual confederacy seem to have acted as stumbling blocks to policy implementation. It is recommended that the Federal Ministry of Education should intensify efforts to harmonize the implementation strategies for CA particularly in ensuring the validity of the instruments used by teachers for assessing learning. ,Keywords: continuous assessment, rational validity, validation measures.

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