TEST QUALITY AND STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCES: AN APPRAISAL OF THE NATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT TEST IN ENGLISH AND MATHEMATICS FOR CAMEROON PRIMARY SCHOOLS

Evaluation is an essential facet of education and plays a significant role in giving feedbacks to stakeholders. Pedagogy is not complete without learners’ assessment and. Objective tests are used extensively as test format in primary school. However, conception and making remains a challenge to most teachers. This cast doubts over the quality. To mitigate the issues about its quality, each test format should undergo item analysis or task analysis. This study sets out to evaluate item and test quality of a national achievement test of English language using difficulty index (DIF), and discrimination indices (DI); to identify which task were appropriate for the respective levels. The study made use of data collected by the ministry of basic education aimed at measuring the true score of their learners in order to plan new pedagogic tools for improving the quality of reading and mathematics amongst primary school pupils. The Classical Test Theory (CTT) that utilizes two main statistics: the item difficulty index and the discrimination index were employed. Through an ex-post factor analysis results obtained showed that the national achievement test was easy, thus depicting the good performance of pupils’ whereas in reality it is the reverse. About 90% of the pupils got Items that were virtually correct consequently useless for discriminating among pupils. Task like Measurement and size for class three, addition and subtraction and familiar word identification for class five should be completely discarded as their DIF stood at 1.00. Given that, quality control is important for test development. Teachers are recommended to perform item analysis and to synchronize classroom instruction with test items to achieve instructional validity. Article visualizations