Differential Item Functioning Of Waec Senior Secondary Certificate Examination Biology Multiple Choice Items
Madueke Uchenna Obiageli
Department of Science and computer Education, Faculty of Education, Godfrey Okoye University
Prof. Casmir N Ebouh
Department of Science and computer Education, Faculty of Education, Godfrey Okoye University
Keywords: Differential Item Functioning, WAEC, Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination, Biology Multiple Items, Item Response Theory, , Item Fairness, Item Bias
Abstract
The main purpose of this study was to investigate the Differential Item Functioning of WAEC Senior Secondary Certificate Examination Biology Multiple choice items. Ex-post facto research design was used for carrying out this study because the researcher used nonmanipulative independent variables of which in this study are gender and school location. The population of the study was 85,439 which comprised all the Senior Secondary School Biology students in the 292 senior secondary schools in the 17 Local Government Areas of Enugu State. The sample size of this study was 646. This consists of 345 female and 301 male Biology students in 4 urban and 4 rural schools in the study area. The instrument adopted by the researcher for data collection for this study was the 2020 Biology Multiple Choice Questions Test (BMQT) Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (SSCE) developed by West African Examination Council (WAEC). This study shows that out of 50 items in WAEC 2020 SSCE May/June multiple choice Biology questions; with respect to gender, DIF was present in 8 items. These items revealed significant DIF between male and female students with significant level less than 0.05. These items revealed significant DIF between urban and rural students. Hence, the major educational implication of the findings of the study is that when obvious bias of test items is present in national and regional examinations as seen in the WAEC 2020 Biology Multiple Choice Items of the Senior School Certificate Examination, because of DIF, such items threaten and undermine the total test validity which could jeopardize the classification of subgroup based on their true score which negatively affect test fairness in general. It was concluded that hat the items function differentially among male and female examinees. The study recommended that Item developer should ensure that the differential item functioning effects of items are properly determined in the test instrument to avoid bias against a subgroup of the test takers