THE CONSTRUCTION AND VALIDATION OF A LANGUAGE SKILLS TEST FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS ENROLLED IN BASIC BUSINESS COMMUNICATIONS

Purpose of the Study. The purpose of this study was to identify the basic language usage skills which are needed by students enrolled in the Basic Business Communications course at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and to develop and validate an instrument to measure these skills.;Jury members were asked to indicate those items on the composite list which should be included or omitted from study in an introductory business communication course and which students in such a course should master. The jury responses were used in determining the items to be included in the language skills test. Test items were developed for those items receiving the highest percentage of positive responses from jury members. The test questions were then submitted to the jury of experts for content validation and to determine item clarity and item significance.;After the development and validation of the initial test form, the language skills test was taken through three stages of revision to arrive at a final testing instrument. The test was administered to students enrolled in sections of Basic Business Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln during the first and second summer sessions of 1980 and the fall semester of the 1980-1981 school year.;After each administration of the test, the results were subjected to item analysis statistics to determine how test items functioned with regard to (1) the discrimination power for each item, (2) the difficulty level of each item, and (3) the internal consistency of the testing instrument as measured by coefficient alpha. The item analysis provided statistical data for item retention or deletion.;Procedures. Selected literature was surveyed to identify language usage skills which might be covered in an introductory business communication course. Data collected from this survey of literature were used to develop a comprehensive composite list of language usage skills. The content validity of the composite list was established by a nine-member jury of experts in the field of business communication.;In order to determine the degree of concurrent validity existing between the developed language skills test and an established standardized language skills test, 30 randomly selected students from the final testing group were also given the Cooperative English Test. Student scores from both the developed language skills test and the standardized Cooperative English Test were subjected to the Pearson Product Moment Correlation analysis which computed the degree of correlation between the two tests.;Findings and Conclusions. The language skills which jury members considered to be most important in the development of effectively written business communications included various aspects of grammar, sentence construction, word choice, emphasis, tone, paragraphing, capitalization, punctuation, and the expression of numbers.;The internal consistency of the final testing instrument as shown by a coefficient alpha of 0.8359 indicated that the test was reliable and was a suitable instrument for identifying language usage strengths and weaknesses. In addition, a Pearson Product Moment Correlation of 0.7595 which existed between the developed language skills test and the standardized Cooperative English Test was a further indication that the language skills test was a reliable testing instrument.;Based on the findings of this study, the following conclusions were reached: (1)The content of the testing instrument was valid. (2)The instrument was internally consistent and was a reliable testing instrument. (3)A mean score of 52.0602 from a total of 85 items on the final test form indicated that college students enrolled in the Basic Business Communications course at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln were weak in the area of language usage skills.