Construct Irrelevant Factors and Test Validity: Investigating the Relationship among Gender, Age, Mother Tongue, Field of Study and TOEFL IBT ® Results

Ary, Sorensen, and Walker (2014) refer to these factors as construct irrelevant ones. Computer like other innovations has aspects that should be investigated. In some cases, computer can distort the tests results and be a source of threat for test validity (construct irrelevant variance). Besides computer familiarity, other demographical factors such as gender, age, mother tongue and filed of study can be the sources of construct irrelevant variance. Therefore, the researchers chose to analyze the role of these phenomenon in the assessing procedure. In order to do this, one hundred participants answered computer familiarity and attitude toward computer questionnaires and a computer based TOEFL IBT®. At the first step, the level of computer familiarity was investigated and the next stage was related to probing attitude of the participants toward computer and effect of three specified variables (age, gender, and mother tongue) on the test results. Results did not indicate meaningful relation between these variables and test scores.