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

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.