Construction and Validation of Symbolic Retention Ability Test

Abstract

Education is a method or process of transmitting or learning universal mental processes, developing the abilities of thought and assessment, and, in general, intellectually modifying oneself or others for mature life. The ability to compare number and symbols, such as digits, efficiently is linked to mathematical competence across the life span. The teacher's use of symbolic representations becomes second nature, as they are deeply integrated with conceptual understanding and subject knowledge. Such representations, however, may place significant additional demands on learners who are already challenged by the abstract nature of concepts as well as the variety of unfamiliar substances to which these concepts are applied in the curriculum. Taking a broadly constructivist approach to learning, While the majority of students are conceptual thinkers who communicate verbally, some students have a different learning style, that the students are more interested to solve the mathematical problems by using formula and symbols. Thus, the Symbolic Retention Ability help the student to understand the mathematical problems in a meaningful way and solving them in a systematic way. This paper is an attempt to construct and validate a tool for assessing the symbolic retention ability among higher secondary students. For this purpose, a collection of 60 mathematical statements with related symbols from the content of XI standard mathematics text-book covering six dimensions viz. geometry, statistics, probability, number theory, calculus and set theory. These gathered 60 statements were undergone pilot study with 100 higher secondary students in Puducherry region and on the basis of index of difficulty and index of discrimination values 37 statements have been selected. The reliability and validness have also been found for this test. Hence, a complete and full-fledged Symbolic Retention Ability Test has been constructed and validated through this study and it will be an enough tool to measure the Symbolic Retention Ability of the higher secondary students.