ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the Finnish national evaluation of learning outcomes in English that was organized in spring 2021 in the middle of the pandemic. The evaluation was the second phase of a longitudinal evaluation and could therefore not be postponed even though 50% of the students were distance learning at the time of the evaluation. The digitized test was organized either under a teacher’s supervision in a classroom or distantly by means of the students’ own laptops.
The two different modes of test administration and their impact on the results have given rise to questions about the validity of the evaluation. First, to what extent was the test comparable between the different test administrations (school vs home)? Second, how fair was the test for different students as the amount of guidance and equipment available varied between administrations, municipalities, and schools? And finally, to what extent are the conclusions drawn from the results useful for national and local decision-making purposes? The validity of the evaluation is discussed on the basis of Messick’s (1989) unified validity framework and Bachman and Palmer’s (1996, 2010) model of test usefulness to see to what extent they are applicable to the situation described.
