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 WAEC and NECO in Federal Capital Territory Abuja, Nigeria. The study utilized descriptive survey research design. The study population consists of 18,153 SS III students from 55 public secondary schools that have been presenting students in writing Mathematics examination during WAEC and NECO SSCE in FCT Abuja. Multistage stratified random sampling technique was used to sample 375 respondents. The instruments used for data collection were two Mathematics Achievement Test (MAT); whose items were adopted from WAEC and NECO multiple-choice question papers of 2014. In order to make sure the instrument measured what they are 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 WAEC and NECO Mathematics. Cronbach Alpha method was used to established internal consistency indices of 0.82 and 0.81 respectively. Classical Test Theory (CTT) model of item analysis was used to establish the difficulty, discrimination and distracter indices of the test items. The mean difficulty indices, mean discrimination indices and mean distracter indices were used to analyze data for answer research questions one to three. 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 and discrimination indices of Mathematics examination items used by WAEC and NECO should be sustained and improved upon.