Assessment of Psychometric Qualities of Gender Performance in Basic Education Certificate Examination in Mathematics Multiple Choice Test Items

Abstract

The study was aimed at assessing the psychometric qualities of gender in 
Mathematics multiple choice test items in Basic Education Certificate 
Examination (BECE) in Oyo State. Four research questions and one hypothesis 
guided the study and was tested at 0.05 level of significance. An instrumentation 
research design was adopted. The population of this study consisted of all Junior 
Secondary class three students in Ibadan, Oyo State. The multistage sampling 
technique was employed to sample out 750 students from the population. The 
instrument used for data collection was the 2017 BECE Mathematics multiple 
choice test items. The reliability value of the items using KR20 was 0.78. DIF 
measure statistics of Winsteps was used to assess the difficulty indices of both 
the male and the female involved in the study and also tested the stated 
hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. The finding revealed that there were 
incidences of gender variance in the test scores. Reliability with IRT of .98 
showed high representativeness of the items but lack local independence of item, 
hence, it lacked unidimensionality. The test contained 19 bad items and 41 good 
ones, therefore it was concluded that the 19 items should either be deleted, 
reviewed, removed or restructured. It was therefore recommended that 
examination bodies should be mindful of the existence of ‘item noise’ which could cause bias in gender performance in an examination. It was equally 
recommended that government should developed calibrated MAT items Bank.