Volume 1 (Issue 1) Download

An alternative approach to calculate discrimination index

P.K. Joshi, Y. Jain, R. Khunyakari and S. Basu

 

Abstract

The large-scale educational assessment tools have predominantly been using multiple-choice question (MCQ) format to assess the extent of understanding of the students. Analysing student’s responses using discrimination index (DI) is also well established. The DI provides insights into various patterns of responses, which if systematically analysed, may provide insights into the quality of questions asked in an assessment tool. Our study reports an alternative method to compute DI, which is reliable, allows us to assess long answer questions (LAQs) and opens scope for further analysis of the quality of test items. The reliability of the new computational method is established by comparing three different sets of data drawn from student responses in the International Junior Science Olympiad (IJSO) and two competitive events from which students were selected for IJSO, from three academic years. The alternative method suggested makes an important contribution, particularly analysing responses to large scale assessments.