Journal of Computing Theories and Applications
Vol. 4 No. 1 (2026): JCTA 4(1) 2026

Transformer-Based Support for Content-Validity Pre-Screening in Educational Materials

Safuan Safuan (Universitas Muhammadiyah Semarang)
Dhendra Marutho (Universitas Muhammadiyah Semarang)
Ahmad Ilham (Universitas Muhammadiyah Semarang)
Muhammad Munsarif (Universitas Muhammadiyah Semarang)
Wendy Sarasjati (Universitas Muhammadiyah Semarang)
Edy Winarno (Universitas Muhammadiyah Semarang)
Arnold Adimabua Ojugo (Federal University of Petroleum Resources)
De Rosal Ignatius Moses Setiadi (Universitas Dian Nuswantoro)



Article Info

Publish Date
31 Aug 2026

Abstract

Content validity assessment is essential for determining whether educational materials adequately represent intended learning outcomes. However, conventional assessment procedures require substantial expert time and may produce inconsistent decisions across large item collections. This study develops a transformer-based framework to support content-validity pre-screening through two complementary tasks: predicting expert-derived Aiken’s V coefficients and classifying instructional-item essentiality. The final dataset comprised 652 Indonesian-language educational text items independently evaluated by four subject-matter experts. To reduce information leakage, identical and normalized-equivalent texts were grouped before applying a group-aware 70:15:15 training–validation–test split. Classical TF-IDF-based baselines were compared with IndoBERT, multilingual BERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and multilingual DeBERTa-v3. For Aiken’s V regression, multilingual BERT achieved the lowest MAE of 0.0501, the lowest RMSE of 0.0625, and the highest R² of 0.5239, whereas multilingual DeBERTa-v3 achieved the highest Spearman correlation of 0.7532. For essentiality classification, XLM-RoBERTa achieved the highest accuracy of 0.8557 and Macro-F1 of 0.8161, whereas multilingual BERT achieved the highest balanced accuracy of 0.8135 and ROC-AUC of 0.9111. Error analysis showed that the models captured textual patterns associated with expert-derived outcomes but remained limited when judgments depended on broader curricular context, competency hierarchies, prerequisite relationships, or relationships among instructional items. The findings support the use of transformer models as human-in-the-loop decision-support tools for prioritizing uncertain or potentially problematic educational items. However, the framework should be interpreted as a pre-screening mechanism rather than a replacement for expert judgment, and external validation across institutions and disciplines remains necessary.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

jcta

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT Decision Sciences, Operations Research & Management

Description

Journal of Computing Theories and Applications (JCTA) is a refereed, international journal that covers all aspects of foundations, theories and the practical applications of computer science. FREE OF CHARGE for submission and publication. All accepted articles will be published online and accessed ...