Item Analysis: A Veritable Tool for Effective Assessment in Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Effective assessment is central to education enterprise globally and its impact cannot be over emphasized. The paper focuses on item analysis as a veritable tool for ensuring effective assessment in education industry. The paper gives an overview of item analysis segments such as difficulty index, discrimination index and distractor efficiency. Efforts were made to explore these variables, their relevance and applicability in education, particularly teaching and learning processes. While the paper agued on the importance of item analysis in ensuring effective and efficient assessment in teaching and learning in line with global best practices, it was found out that the unconcerned of practitioners in determination of item analysis when constructing questions is hampering the relevance of item analysis, thus, the paper recommends among other things that practitioners should be engaged in addition to vetting question papers, in item analysis to enable them find empirically the suitability of a question or otherwise.

Keywords: Difficulty index, Discrimination index, Distractor efficiency, Effective assessment

DOI: 10.7176/JEP/12-21-04

Publication date:July 31^st 2021