Abstract
Aims: To determine the effect of test item arrangements in ascending, descending and no consistent order of difficulty in multiple choice tests on undergraduate pharmacy students’ academic achievement in a chemistry course. The present study served as an attempt to relate the effect of test item arrangement on undergraduate pharmacy students’ academic achievement in a chemistry course in Nigerian Universities.
 Study Design: Quasi-experimental research design of pre-test posttest non-equivalent group design was adopted in carrying out this research.
 Place and Duration of Study: This study was carried out in ten Nigerian Universities between August, 2020 to April, 2021.
 Methodology: We sampled 200 participants (111 male, 89 females; age range 16 – 27 years) undergraduate pharmacy students drawn from ten (10) Universities in Nigeria. Twenty undergraduate pharmacy students offering Basic Principle of Chemistry (Chem. 101) were randomly selected from each of the selected universities for the study.
 Results: The mean scores when test items were arranged in ascending, descending, and no consistent orders of item difficulty were 44.38, 37.85 and 40.13 respectively. Their differential mean scores were 6.53, 2.28 and 4.26 in the same order. This implies that pharmacy students obtained higher scores when test items were arranged in ascending order of difficulty, followed by no consistent order and least in descending order of difficulty. The findings further revealed no significant arrangement by gender interaction effect on undergraduate pharmacy students` performance in the three tests.
 Conclusion: This study will help pharmacy lecturers in determining the most appropriate test item order which will help the students obtain high scores in any pharmaceutical test. The researchers conducted a quasi-experimental study on the topic as part of their undergraduate curriculum to examine the best test item format that will enhance pharmacy students' academic achievement in a chemistry course.
Highlights
Item arrangement is a major factor that may influence undergraduate pharmacy students’ achievement in any examination
The mean scores when test items were arranged in ascending, descending, and no consistent orders of item difficulty were 44.38, 37.85 and 40.13 respectively. Their differential mean scores were 6.53, 2.28 and 4.26 in the same order. This implies that pharmacy students obtained higher scores when test items were arranged in ascending order of difficulty, followed by no consistent order and least in descending order of difficulty
It was revealed that most students failed because the test items were arranged from a more difficult to simpler ones. [13] carried out a study on the impact of item positions in multiple choice test on students’ performance at the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) level, it was reported that the performance of students were significantly better when test items are arranged from the easier ones to the difficult one, but on the contrary, [14] in their study on test anxiety work and [15] in a study on the effect of change in item sequence on students’ performance in multiple choice test reported no significant difference in the scores of the students with respect to different orderings of test items
Summary
Item arrangement is a major factor that may influence undergraduate pharmacy students’ achievement in any examination. Arrangement of multiple-choice test items could be in ascending, descending and no consistent order of difficulty. Ascending order of difficulty arrangement means arranging the test items from simple to complex. Descending order of arrangement means arranging the test items from complex to simple while no consistent order of arrangement means arranging the test items in a random manner. It is not possible to say that a particular type of test item format is the best; the most important thing is the ability of the test format to measure learnersachievement with respect to recall or application of knowledge and by any other reliable means in the behavoural changes after instructions have been passed across [1]. Test item order is one of the factors influencing pharmacy students’ learning outcome in higher institutions of learning
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