necessity of the systematic approach to testing in persian language:a contrast between teachers’ estimations and statistical fact

at the pre-test stage, one of the important stages in language testing, items of the test are given to some language learners who are at same level as the target test takers, and through the statistical analysis of their responses, the information such as item facility and item discrimination are gained. also, unreliable and problematic items are distinguished and amended. this research tries to answer this question that “can we rely on a criterion called teaches’ estimations to reach to the amount of items’ facility/difficulty, or otherwise, it is necessary to apply pre-test and statistical analysis?” in other words, persian language teachers’ estimations of difficulty/facility of the test items (i.e. their guesses, judgments and predictions) to what extent are matched with difficulty/facility indexes gained by statistical analysis of test takers’ responses (i.e. statistical fact of the test) and can be a substitute for pre-test and statistical stages? in fact, this research aims to show the necessity/unnecessity of the pre-test -that exists in the modern systematic and statistical approach to testing- through the contrast between teachers’ estimations and statistical fact of the test. to do so, 151 answer sheets of persian language learners belonged to one of the final reading comprehension tests (at elementary level) were investigated and after calculating the facility index of all 28 items, these indexes were compared with the estimations of 30 teachers. our findings indicated that with a pure reliance on teachers’ experience or intuitional estimations, it will not be possible to pontificate that items of a test are difficult, easy, or ideal, and this shows that internalizing the statistical and systematic approach to testing, in assessing and evaluating the language knowledge of persian language learners is a must.