Construction and Standardization of Multiple Choice Tests for Senior Secondary Two (SS II) Students on Economics in Rivers State: The Traditional Approach

Abstract

The study problem was construction and standardization of achievement test on Economics for Senior Secondary two (SSII) students in Rivers State. The main purpose of the study was to construct 100 test items and determine the difficulty level and calculating the discrimination index of the test items. Two statistical techniques were used for item analysis, the Item Difficulty and Item Discrimination Index. The Item Difficulty and the Item Discrimination Index values of 0.4 to 0.6 for each index per test item were used to select 50 out of 100 items. After which the validity and reliability of the test were estimated on the selected fifty (50) items. The test was subjected for content validity and yielded a reliability index of 0.93 using split half reliability technique. In the process of standardizing the test, the 50 item test, the test was administered based on the following norms; Gender, Location, School Ownership and School Type and it was limited to a representative sample of 250 students from five senior secondary schools in Rivers State. The analysis for standardization was done using frequency count, mean and independent sample t-test from the final scores. From the results, there were differences for some norms while for some, there were no difference.