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. Three research questions guided the study while one null hypothesis was tested at 0.05 alpha level of significance. Descriptive survey research design was adopted in the research work.The population of the study was all the Senior Secondary three (SS 111) students who offered physics in the public secondary schools in Abia State. The sample ofthe study consisted of 504 SS III physics students drawn from 20 schools from the three Educational Zones of the State. A combination of purposive, proportionate stratified sampling and simple random sampling techniques were used for the study. The instrument for data collection was a 51-item Physics Achievement Test (PAT) drawn from past WASSCE (West African Senior School Certificate Examination and NECO (National Examination Council) question papers. The instrument was face-validated by experts in the department. The internal consistency was determined using Kuder-Richardson’s formular 20 (K-R20) techniques because the items were dichotomously scored. Data was analyzed using the mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions while one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test the hypothesis and a post-hoc (Turkey) test was used to find the degree of significance. The study revealed that the 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. It was recommended that teachers and examination bodies should keep to the ascending order of arrangement