Influence of Multiple-Choice Item Ordering on Academic Achievement in English Language and Mathematics in Unity Schools in North-East, Nigeria

Abstract

The study investigated the influence of test item ordering on academic achievement in English language and Mathematics in unity schools in North-East, Nigeria. The study was experimental. The population comprised all the 5403 JSS 3 students in unity schools in North-East, Nigeria. A sample of 600 JSS 3 students was used. Two instruments, each prepared in three different formats were used for the study viz: (1) Mathematics Achievement Test and (2) English Language Achievement each of the test was prepared in three formats following the ways the items were arranged (1) Easy to difficult (ETD), (2) Difficult to easy (DTE), and (3) Mixed difficulty indices (MDI). The instruments were validated by four experts; two in measurement and evaluation, one in mathematics, and one in English language. Test-retest reliability was used to establish reliability indices of the two instruments. The reliability estimates that were obtained for the Mathematics achievement test are as follows: format 0.512, for format ETD, 0.849 for DTE and 0.718 for MDI. The reliability estimates that were obtained for the English Language achievement test are as follows: 0.728 for format ETD, 0.669 for format DTE and 0.877 for format MDI. ANOVA was used to test the null hypotheses. The major finding of the study were: (1) the results showed that JSS 3 students that were exposed to Difficult to easy (DTE) format in Mathematics had the highest mean achievement scores. (2) There was a significant difference between the mean achievement scores in English language of JSS 3 students exposed to different orderings of the items in favour of DTE test item format. Based on the findings, it was recommended that English Language tests items should be ordered from the difficult ones to the easy ones since the highest academic achievement of students was recorded using this method and that Mathematics tests items should be ordered from the easy ones to the difficult ones since the highest academic achievement of students was recorded using this method.