Paper Key : IRJ************239
Author: Solomon Chukwu Ohiri,Romy O. Okoye
Date Published: 18 Oct 2023
Abstract
In psychology and education, tests are made of items. The quality of each item contributes in no small measure to the quality of the test. In ensuring that the items are of good quality, they are subjected to what is known as item analysis. Item analysis is a process which evaluates testees responses on individual test items in order to ascertain the characteristics of each item and the relationship between them. It provides constructive feedback about the goodness of items. Effective test item development requires an organized, detail-oriented approach based on solid theoretical education measurement procedures to ensure validity and reliability of the test items. Classical test theory (CTT) is a conventional quantitative approach to testing the reliability and validity of an instrument based on its items. As a theory of error measurement, it has statistics for evaluating individual items from a quantitative perspective. The purpose of this paper is to describe in details, the application of classical test theory in test item development and analysis. The reason for the application of CTT is to have test items that will yield a reasonable degree of reliability. The statistics used in this regard are item difficulty, which is a measure of the proportion of testees who responded to an item correctly; the item discrimination, which is the measure of how well the items discriminate between examinees with high and low levels of knowledge or ability. Also of interest are reliability, which deals with the degree to which the same responses repeatedly given to the same questions attract the same scores, and standard error of measurement (SEM), which is an index that indicates the accuracy with which an individuals score approximates the true score for the same individual. At the end of analysis, items are selected if the difficulty indices fall between 0.3 and 0.7. On item discrimination, an item is acceptable or selected if the discrimination index falls between +0.3 and +1.0.