An Alignment Study of English Achievement Tests, Contents of Instruction, and Iranian EFL Seventh Grade Textbook

The current research set out to analyze Prospect 1, the officially prescribed textbook for 7th grade high school students in Iran, its relevant achievement tests, and contents of instruction. More specifically, the study sought to investigate the variation in cognitive domain and types of knowledge represented by the achievement tests, contents of instruction, and the textbook drawing on Bloom’ (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) revised taxonomy of educational objectives. It further examined the alignment among the three curriculum components of interest. Research instruments included a checklist of educational objectives (Rezvani & Zamani, 2012) and a survey of contents of instruction (Rezvani & Haghshenas, 2014) both developed based on Bloom’s revised taxonomy (2001). English teachers, both male and female (n = 12), took part in the study. Porter`s (2002) alignment index was employed to compute the alignment among each pair of tests and textbook, contents of instruction and textbook, and contents of instruction and tests. The quantitative analysis of the collected data indicated that all three alignment indices of the curriculum component pairs were significantly adequate (I>0.50). The findings of the study also demonstrated that ‘Remember’ and ‘Understand’ were the most prevalent cognitive domains. The outcomes also suggested that higher order thinking skills were the least dominant ones. Efforts to incorporate activities and contents that would help develop learners` higher order skills by the authors and teachers of the book as the main source of educational activities are recommended.