Assessing Indonesian student inductive reasoning: Rasch analysis

Abstract

Inductive reasoning is an ability related to student academic achievement and is embedded in 21st-century competency frameworks. The purpose of this study was to evaluate Indonesian students’ inductive reasoning, validate an adapted inductive reasoning test for Indonesia, and classify the difficulty of items and students’ reasoning ability. The participants were 856 students in Grades 10, 11, and 12 in senior high schools as well as undergraduate students in higher educational institutions in West Kalimantan province, Indonesia. Four different tasks were employed to assess student inductive reasoning. The data collection comprised an onlinetest through the eDia assessment platform and a traditional paper-based test. The results from the Rasch analysis demonstrated that the adapted inductive reasoning test met the validity and reliability criteria based on Rasch parameters. Differential item functioning (DIF) analysis revealed that only one of the 40 items is in the moderate to large DIF category based on the test method. The results further revealed that students performed better in solving figural items than numeric items. Furthermore, older students in higher grades had higher logit measures than younger students, however, no significant differences were found between students in Grades 10 and 11. No significant differences were found between females and males. The difficulty of items and students’ abilities were also classified to understand the evaluation of students’ inductive reasoning.