THE CONTENT VALIDITY OF 2018 JSS3 INTEGRATED SCIENCE EXAMINATION
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THE CONTENT VALIDITY OF 2018 JSS3 INTEGRATED SCIENCE EXAMINATION
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the study
The importance of secondary education in an educational system cannot be over-emphasised. Apart from serving as a link between primary and tertiary education, secondary school education provides opportunity for a child to acquire additional knowledge, skills and desirable attitudes after the primary education level. The purpose of secondary education in Abia State and Nigeria at large is to provide children with knowledge, skills, attitudes and ability which can enable them acquire tertiary education. That is, it is aimed at developing the child for better education beyond the primary education by acquiring literacy, numeracy and communication skills [1,2]. The Federal Republic of Nigeria [3] through the National Policy on Education (NPE) introduced six-year duration for secondary education given in two stages of three years each, that is, the junior secondary school and senior secondary school respectively. These two levels of secondary school education in Abia state have different examination bodies conducting certification examination for junior secondary school three (JSS3) students and senior secondary school three (SSS3) students.
In order to improve the standard of education at all levels in Nigeria and to lay a sound foundation for senior secondary school, Junior Secondary Certificate Examination was introduced in 1992 which are prepared by each state of the federation and the name changed from JSCE to BECE in 2009. Abia State Government like any other state keyed into the programme. It is assumed that students who are admitted into senior secondary school (SSS) level have passed their Basic Education Certificate Examination which may enable the students possess basic skills, knowledge, attitudes and ability to cope with the challenges of senior secondary school level such that they would perform well at the end in either National Examination Council (NECO), National Business and Technical Examinations Board (NABTEB) or West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (WASSCE). WAEC and Adeyemi cited in [4] observed that some students who were promoted to Senior Secondary School one (SS1) because they obtained acceptable grades at Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) later failed at the WASSCE and National Examination Council (NECO), thus questioning the content validity of Basic Education Certificate Examination questions. Junior secondary education is the second level in the Nigerian system of education. The junior secondary school is for children from ages 11 or 12 years and above. The Federal Ministry of Education (FME) in its National Policy on Education stated that the junior secondary school system shall be pre-vocational, academic, tuition free, universal and compulsory for the three years after which the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) is taken both at the state and federal levels. A total of twenty-two different subjects are administered at the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) level and a candidate is expected to sit for a minimum of ten subjects and maximum of 13 subjects. Candidates are deemed to pass the Basic Education Certificate Examination at credit level with Mathematics, English Language and Integrated science as subjects that are pre-requisite for admission into senior secondary one (SS I)
The assessment of learning outcomes by using questions to assess students’ academic performance is one of the basic issues in educational system of Abia State. Tests like the Basic Education Certificate Examination questions in Integrated science are usually used to measure how well students understood Integrated science at the junior secondary level and for promotion to the next class. There is therefore the need to ensure that tests administered by Abia State Educational Resource Centre are as fair as possible for all students in junior secondary schools across the state. Integrated science is a subject taught at both primary and junior secondary school levels of education in Abia State. It is an introductory course which gives background knowledge to students for the study of science and science related subjects in the senior secondary schools. It is a pre-requisite subject and compulsory for all junior secondary school students, because it aids the students to study science subjects in the Senior Secondary Schools (SSS). Omiko [5] stressed that Integrated science as a science in undifferentiated form stresses the fundamental unity of science. Integrated science involves the study of elementary Biology, Chemistry, Geography and Physics as a single science subject in the primary and junior secondary schools. Integrated science as a subject offers students with the basic training in scientific skills required for human survival, sustainable development and societal transformation. These account for reasons why students’ performance in Integrated science should be a major concern.
Integrated science as a subject in the curriculum over the years has been a problem for most students [6]. A recent report (2018) by the Educational Resource Centre (ERC), Yola, states that only 33.34% of candidates registering for Basic
Education Certificate Examination make credit in Integrated science. This remark however, is very alarming and calls for rapid attention if Abia as a state is to compete with the other states in Nigeria. Students’ academic performance in Integrated science as in other subjects may be influenced by a lot of factors which may not allow one to have a judicious knowledge of their real performance. It is also evidenced that students’ performance in Integrated science can be measured using tests or examinations [7].
Some of the important factors to be considered in judging quality of a good test are relevance, fairness, efficiency, objectivity, specificity, discrimination, adequacy, reliability and validity [8]. Validity is the degree to which a test items in Integrated science measures what it intends to measure accurately or it is the degree of accuracy with which Integrated science test items measure what it intended to measure. Nkwocha [9] stressed that content validity is the extent to which questions consist of a representative sample of subject matter and objectives the test item is designed to measure. It is very important that test questions make a fair coverage of the subject matter contents because if few areas of the subject matter are consistently emphasized by the questions designed and administered over a few testing period by the examiners, students may not perform well and also may not fully discover their ability, capability, skills and knowledge. This type of practice tends to lead students to study only these few areas for examination sake, while the other areas are neglected.
Other causes of students’ poor performance in BECE might be the presence of bias in questions which may be through poor representation of the topics thereby threatening the content validity of such examination. According to Opara and Uwah [7], test items arrangement plays a vital role in determining the performance of students in examinations. Test items arrangement based on descending order of difficulty arrangement has negative effect on students’ performance in Mathematics among junior secondary school students.
In Abia State, the BECE is conducted by Abia State Ministry of Education (MOE) for both public and private junior secondary schools in the state. The state Educational Resource Centre (ERC) receive directives from the state Ministry of Education to develop or construct questions, administer the questions, mark the scripts, award grades and certificates to the examinees under their jurisdiction. But what they normally do is to ask individual teachers on subject basis to set questions and send them to the ERC. Unfortunately, from the preliminary survey of past question papers by the researchers and inspectors of Science Annual Reports, some questions are repeated many times in one question papers; wrong spellings; and some options are missing or are left out blank and these may be responsible for the students’ poor performance in Basic Education Certificate Examination in Integrated science in Abia State [10].
In practice, teachers used by various schools to set these questions may not be competent in their subjects or they are not test experts to construct valid questions that may cover the levels of the cognitive domain with consideration of the representativeness of the topics in the curriculum. This may explain why academic performance of students in junior secondary schools has been poor in BECE particularly in Integrated science in Abia State year after year. In Abia State for example, from the survey of the past results, about 57% of junior secondary school students performed below average. Hence, the academic performance of students in Integrated science in Abia State has been deteriorating. At state level, the trend of pass rate for JSS III was as follows: 36.6% in 2013, 33% in 2014, 38% in 2015, 20.1% in 2016 and 39% in 2017. Thus, this situation is not progressive to the state and students at large.
Some of the causes of students’ poor performance in junior secondary schools in Abia State BECE could be as follows: use of ambiguous statements, unclear questions, inappropriate terms, use of irrelevant technical terms, non-coverage of the content, non-usage of table of specification by examiners and teachers, presence of bias in the questions, difficulty of questions, incorrect arrangement of questions, poor arrangement of options and examination malpractice which may reduce the validity of the examination, leading to students’ poor performance [11,7].Therefore, performance of students in BECE in Integrated science in Abia State has not been encouraging for the past years. Some of the causes of failure of students in BECE Integrated science in Abia State could also be poor quality of teachers recruited, non-usage of table of specification by the teachers or examiners, lack of knowledge on test construction techniques might lead to poor performance of students’ in BECE. Therefore, none of the research work carried out above was conducted in Abia State to examine content validity of questions set by ERC. Hence, there is a need to assess the content validity of the BECE questions in Integrated science in Abia State by examining how proportionate these questions are distributed among the topics in the Integrated science curriculum and the various levels of cognitive domain.
Objectives of the study
The main purpose of the study was to validate III. Various levels of the cognitive domain in the Basic Education Certificate Examina tion Integrated science questions from 2013 to 2017.
Research Questions
The following research questions were raised to guide the study:
• What percentage of the topics in the three years basic education Integrated science curriculum was covered in the Basic Education Certificate Examinations Integrated science questions from 2013 to 2017?
• What percentage of the performance objectives stated in the Integrated science curriculum was assigned to the various levels of the cognitive domain?
• What percentage of the various levels of the cognitive domain was covered in the 2013 to 2017 Basic Education Certificate
Examination Integrated science questions?
Research Hypotheses
The hypotheses formulated and tested are as follows:
H01. There is no significant difference between the topics in the junior secondary school Integrated science curriculum and those examined in the Basic Education Certificate Examination questions in Integrated science.
H02. There is no significant difference between the weights assigned to the various levels of the cognitive domain in the junior secondary school Integrated science curriculum and those assigned to them in the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) questions in Integrated science.
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