Development of Written Test Instruments to Measure Basic Skills of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) Junior High School Students on Science Concept

Abstract

Constructing a high quality of test items needs a substantial time and efforts in developing and examining each test item. Literature suggested this limitation can be remedied with a large collection of test items along with their measurement characteristics which termed as item bank. However, a welldeveloped item bank is formed by a set of high quality of test items using a rigorous development and validation procedures. In achieving this, this study attempts to describe the development of written test instruments to measure basic skills of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) in science concept. Accurate measure of students’ achievement is very crucial for curriculum and instruction planning and educational-related program evaluation. Therefore, the written test instruments to measure basic cognitive skills of STEAM is urgently needed as it usually only assesses the product or the project which being learned. Research data was analyzed using RASCH Model Analysis with Ministep program which investigate the Wright response map, difficulty level, reliability and discrimination index. The sample consisted of 30 students answering 3 science concept sets of 30 test items each; Energy in Life System (reliability value = 0.83), Pressure in Substance and Plants (reliability value = 0.88) and Volcanoes and Earthquake (reliability value = 0.89). Moreover, these reliability value of the test items are considered as a very good quality, with 75 out of 90 items were stored in the item bank and empirically fulfilled the quality as suggested by the Rasch measurement model. Keywords—development, written test instruments, STEAM basic skills, Rasch Measurement Model, item reliability