Analysis of Grade Eight Examination Subjects in the Banadir Region of Somalia

Abstract

Item analysis is essential in the development of assessment tools and in standardised computing measures of student performance. This study was conducted to analyse the questions of grade eight examination subjects in the Banadir region of Somalia with respect to the instructional objectives, the difficulty level, and their impact on the student’s achievement. The population of the study was grade 8 students of the Banadir region of Somalia who sat for the national examinations in 2022. A purposive sampling technique was followed for the selection of subjects and the subject experts. A random sampling technique was used to select 10% of question papers for study in every subject examined in Banadir. Also, the view of 16 subject experts was taken into consideration regarding the design of the question paper, instructional objectives, alignment with the syllabus, and difficulty level. The findings of the study revealed the effect of the difficulty level and instructional objectives on students’ achievement was apparent. However, the study found a severe mismatch between the distribution of the items in the original table of specifications and the analysed items. The study recommended for post examinations analysis to improve the quality of the questions and to conduct separate analyses for each subject in the syllabus.