Development and Validation of a Mathematics Cognitive Achievement Test for Junior Secondary School Students in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria

Abstract

This study developed and validated a Mathematics Cognitive Achievement Test (MCAT) for Junior Secondary School students in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. An instrumentation research design was adopted, using 500 students for item analysis and validation. An initial pool of 70 multiple-choice items was developed from the Junior Secondary School Mathematics curriculum and reviewed by experts in Mathematics Education, Measurement and Evaluation, and Educational Psychology. The items were administered to the sample and evaluated for difficulty, discrimination, distractor effectiveness, content validity and internal consistency. After expert review and empirical analysis, 50 items were retained. The retained items had difficulty indices ranging from 0.20 to 0.80 and discrimination indices from 0.30 to 0.69. Thirty-eight items (76.0%) had three functional distractors, nine had two, and three had one. The overall KR-20 reliability coefficient was 0.89, while the overall expert rating for content validity was 4.54 on a five-point scale. The findings indicate that the final MCAT has satisfactory psychometric characteristics and can be used, with appropriate administration and further local validation, for classroom, diagnostic and research purposes