COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ITEM DIFFICULTY AND DISCRIMINATION INDICES OF MATHEMATICS EXAMINATIONS OF WAEC AND NECO IN FEDERAL CAPITAL TERRITORY ABUJA, NIGERIA

The study compared the analysis of Item difficulty and discrimination indices of Mathematics examinations of II .U:C and NECO in Federal Capital Territory Abuja, Nigeria. The study utilised descriptire s/nrey research design. The study population consists of 18,153 SS III students from 55 public secondary schools that hare been presenting students in writing Mathematics examination during Wf/lEC and NECO SSCE in FCT Abuja. Multistage stratified random sampling technique was used to sample 375 respondents. The instruments used for data collection wen two Mathematics Achieiemen! Test (AMT): whose items wen adopted from WAEC and NECO multiple-choice question papers of 2014. In order to make sun the instrument measured what thy an design to measure, content validity was sought and obtained by submitting the test items to two experts in the field of Measurement and Evaluation and Mathematics Education. The logical consensus of the experts enabled the researchers to establish rational validity indices of 0.86 and 0.83 respectively for 11 ’ LEC and NECO Mathematics. Cronbach Alpha method was used to established internal consistency indices of 0.82 and 0.81 nspectirehy. Classical Test Theory (CTT) model of item analysis was used to establish the difficulty, discrimination and distracier indices cj the test items. The mean difficulty indices, mean discrimination indices and mean distracter indices were used to analyse da!j for answer research questions one to time. By the hypotheses were tested using ttest statistics. This is considered suitable because the two independent mean of the indices were used for the analysis. It recommends that the present levels of difficulty arJ discrimination indices oj Mathematics examination items used by WAEC and NECO should be sustained and improved upon.