Doctoral thesis
This study examined the influence of instructional competence on test construction practices among university instructors in Tanzania. Specifically, the study examined the indicators of instructors’ instructional competence and test construction practices, and establishes the association between different levels of instructors’ instructional competence and test construction practices. Further, the study compared instructors’ instructional competence and test construction practices based on the selected demographic parameters and explored the challenges experienced by university instructors in constructing test items. The study was conducted in two public universities, namely University of Dar es Salaam and Sokoine University of Agriculture. Mzumbe University was used for pilot testing the instruments of the study. The study used a mixed-methods approach informed by both ex-post facto and phenomenological designs. Stratified proportional sampling and simple random sampling techniques were used to select and generate data from a sample of 205 instructors. Heads of departments and quality assurance coordinators were purposively selected. The qualitative data were analysed thematically while Chi-square of independent variables and logistic regression model were used for quantitative data. The analysis revealed that university instructors conceive several key indicators of instructor’s instructional competence in learning. These factors are mastery of the content, pedagogical competences, transactional competences, possession of the students’ assessment skills, language competences, classroom management skills, instructors’ emotional management skills, and psychology of students in learning. However, the study revealed that some of the instructors did not follow the necessary procedures of test construction. There was a high correlation between instructional competence and the levels of adherence to test construction by instructors. Further, instructors faced serious challenges which affected the construction of test items. These are a large number of students and less manpower, lack of resources, lack of training on test construction, and lack of internal moderation commitment. The study concludes that some instructors lacked key instructional competences, such as classroom management and transactional competence, which affected their ability to teach, not to mention test construction skills. There is a relationship between the instructors’ instructional competence and levels of adherence to test construction practices. This, therefore, proposes mandatory workshops and seminars to the instructors who did not go through teacher education. Universities ought to provide enough human and material resources to strengthen teaching and learning.