ABSTRACT

The study investigated the influence of item arrangements in multiple choice objective tests on students academic achievement in physics. The arrangement formats were ascending, descending and no-consistent orders of difficulty. Five research questions guided the conduct of the study while three null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 alpha level of significance in order to make decisions on the issues investigated. Relevant literatures to the study were reviewed. Descriptive survey research design was adopted in the research work which was conducted in Abia state. All the senior secondary three (SS III) students who offered physics in the public secondary schools in Abia state constituted the population of the study. The sample of the study consisted of 504 SS III physics students drawn from 20 schools across the three educational zones of the state. A combination of proportionate stratified sampling technique and simple random sampling technique were adopted for the study. Proportionate stratified sampling technique was used to select 20 schools from the three educational zones while simple random sampling technique ( by balloting) was used in the selection of the sample schools from each zone. For the fact that it was only physics students, it was purposive. An instrument called Physics Achievement Test (PAT) was used for collection of data. This PAT was a 51 item, 4-option multiple choice objective tests based on the topics covered by the students from SS I - SS II. An initial pool of 70 items was developed using WASSCE (West African Senior School Certificate Examination and NECO (National Examination Council) past question papers which were already standardized instruments. Table ofspecification for the PAT was constructed to ensure content validity. However, the instrument was re-validated by experts in physics who scrutinized the 70 questions and pruned them down to 51 questions, deleting the ambiguous ones and modifying others. Data was analyzed using the mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions while two-way analyses ofvariance was used to test the hypothesis. A post-hoc test was carried out using turkey test to find the degree of significance. Among the results obtained after data analyses were: students’ achievement in physics was highest when items were arranged in ascending order of difficulty, higher in the no-consistent order and lowest when the test items were arranged in the descending order. Male students achievement in physics when items were arranged in ascending, descending and no-consistent orders of difficulty was significantly higher than that of the females; there was a significant difference in the achievement mean scores ofstudents from schools located in urban and rural areas in physics when arranged in ascending, descending and no-consistent orders of difficulty. It is recommended that teachers, examination bodies and test developers should keep to the best arrangement pattern ofplacing test items in ascending order arrangement.