In order to design, develop, and utilize tests/assessments responsibly in a professional manner, it is essential for all stakeholders to recognize, appreciate, and appropriately deal with socio-cultural differences between target populations, countries and regions, or various testing scenarios respectively. The purposes of this study is to compare testing standards/guidelines widely accepted in the international community against local ones in Japan, and to delineate unique features of the testing practices and associated social norms in Japan from the global perspective.

In the initial phase of this investigation, we translated some of the ITC guidelines from English into Japanese, and studied their differences from “Testing Standards of Japan†prepared by JART (Japanese Association for Research in Testing) in 2007. In the second phase, we distributed the translated version of ITC documents to Japanese researchers and practitioners in the related fields, and subsequently conducted a series of focus group interviews and ask for their feedbacks.

Through this study, it was found that Japanese language did not have a suitable word for “testing,†and the testing/assessment community in Japan had not been sharing a concept of “testing.†The word “test (in Japanese language)†had been loosely used in Japan to cover a wide range of concepts including both “test†and “testing†without clearly distinguishing them. Therefore, when we translated the ITC documents, it was necessary for us to introduce a new Japanese word for “testing†so that readers would see “test†and “testing†as two different concepts being used differently in the original ITC documents.

In this presentation, we plan to report findings of the study, and outline ideas for supporting the process in which ITC guidelines would gain further recognition within the testing/assessment community in Japan.