Application of item response theory in the development and standardization of chemistry achievement test for senior secondary schools

Thesis Overview

<p> </p><p><strong>INTRODUCTION</strong></p><p><strong>Background of the study</strong></p><p>Testing has become one of the most important parameters by which a society adjudges the product of her educational system. Testing has always been an important part of the school system that even the habitual absentees normally turn up to school and present themselves for testing on examination days. The essence of testing is to reveal the latent ability of an examinee. Emaikwu (2012) stated that testing has been fully accepted in most modern societies as the most objective method of collecting information for decision making in schools, industries and government establishments. Emaikwu further stated that testing is now used for admission, recruitment, promotion, placement, evaluation, guidance, research and teaching purposes among others. A test according to Nworgu (2003), is a structured situation comprising of set of questions to which an individual is expected to respond independently and each question in the test has a preferred answer. The results of these tests are usually treated in such a way as to provide a quantitative comparison of the performance of the different students.</p><p>Based on the level of performance criterion, there are three types of test which are the General mental ability tests, Separate ability test and Achievement test (Nkemakolam,2003).General mental test may also be called “intelligence test”. It is designed to measure a wide range of individual functioning in terms of those mental or intellectual abilities that are useful in almost any aspect of thinking while Separate ability test measures specialized abilities and aptitudes ie they are restricted to the measurement of a limited range of current capacity in a particular area of knowledge such as manipulative ability, mechanical comprehension or verbal ability. According to Nworgu (2003) Achievement test are designed to measure the outcome of the level of accomplishment in a specified programme of instruction in a subject area which a student had undertaken in recent past. Nworgu explained further that achievement test can be classified based on quality into two which are: Teacher-made (classroom) tests and Standardized tests. Teacher –made tests are tests constructed and administered by the classroom teacher for the purpose of measuring the attainment of the objectives by the students. Most tests used in our educational system are of this type.</p> <br><p></p>