PSYCHOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF WAEC AND NECO PRACTICAL PHYSICS TESTS USING PARTIAL CREDIT MODEL
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ABSTRACT
The purpose of the study was to analyse the psychometric qualities of practical physics questions of West African Examination Council and National Examinations Council using the Partial Credit Model (PCM). The objectives of the study were specifically to evaluate the Standard Error of Measurement (SEM), the fit statistics and item difficulty estimates of WAEC and NECO practical physics items and also to test for significance difference of NECO, WAEC and NECO-WAEC psychometric qualities in various years. The apparent difference in the public image of WAEC and NECO examinations, the neglect of psychometric analsyis of polytomously scored physics items and the absolute importance of psychomotor assessments in physics, motivated the researcher to carry out this study. The design of the study was instrumentation research design and the area of the study was Enugu State of Nigeria. The population of the study was all SS III physics students of 2012/2013 academic session in Enugu State. A sample of 668 physics students was drawn through multi stage sampling procedure. The instrument for the study consisted of four different tests viz; two practical physics questions of NECO 2011 and 2012 (PPQN, 1 and 2) and two practical physics questions of WAEC 2011 and 2012 (PPQW, 1 and 2). Eight research questions and nine hypotheses guided the study. The research questions were answered using the descriptive statistics of Winstep software maximum likelihood ratio. The hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance using the SPSS independent sample t-test statistics, and the chi square goodness of fit test using WINSTEP PCM analysis and SPSS. The major findings of the study indicated that: The standard error of measurement (SEM) of items of WAEC and NECO practical physics in 2011 and 2012 were very low- below 0.18 for all items. The fit statistic indicated that nearly all the items of both exams NECO and WAEC were valid and thus sufficiently demonstrated unidimensionality; The item difficulty estimates (b) for both examinations for the two years studied showed that all the items have difficulty estimates that range between -1.53 to +1.94 which show that their difficulty are moderate for all items. All the four different tests that constituted the instrument had very high proportion of their item fit to PCM with all the four parts having 0.92 proportion of fit. Other findings of the study include; There was significant difference in NECO 2011and NECO 2012, SEM. There was no significant difference between WAEC 2011 and WAEC 2012; NECO 2011 and WAEC 2011; NECO 2012 and WAEC 2012, SEM; NECO 2011 and NECO 2012; WAEC 2011 and WAEC 2012; NECO 2011 and WAEC 2011; NECO 2012and WAEC 2012 fit (validity) analysis; and in the difficulty estimates of NECO 2011 and NECO 2012; WAEC 2011 and WAEC 2012; NECO 2011 and WAEC 2011; NECO 2012 and WAEC 2012 tests. Based on the close resemblance of the psychometric qualities of these two examination bodies as revealed by these findings it is recommended that the confidence and recognition accorded to these two examination bodies by the public and educational institutions continues to be the same.
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