Investigating the Alignment of University Entrance Exams, Textbooks and Official Standards of TEFL in terms of Anderson and Krathwohl's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives

This study attempted to investigate the alignment between Iran''s B. A. official curriculum standards، M. A. state university entrance exams of TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) and SAMT (The Organization for Researching and Composing University Textbooks in the Humanities) official textbooks. The official standards، exam questions and activities in the textbooks were content analyzed using a checklist developed by the researchers based on Anderson and Krathwohl''s taxonomy of educational objectives. After specifying the cognitive processes and types of knowledge using a two dimensional taxonomy، they were converted into separate matrices and porter''s alignment index was calculated to determine the extent to which standards، assessments and textbooks are aligned. The results of this study، most importantly، indicated that in all the components lower-order thinking skills with the frequency 83. 5% were more frequently represented than higher-order processes which involved only 16. 3% of the objectives. Moreover، the alignment index indicated a low level of balance between the curriculum components; whereas، there was a higher level of balance between standards and assessments