Abstract

"Gender Difference on IRT Analysis of psychometric properties of the 2015 Kano State Mathematics Senior Secondary Qualifying Examination in Dala Education Zone " is a study that sought to investigate the difficulty, discrimination and guessing-indices of the multiple-choice items of the examination. Three (3) hypotheses stating no significant differences in the mean difficulty, discrimination and guessing indices of items in relation to gender were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study employed the Item Response Theory (IRT) and Item Analysis as theoretical and conceptual framework respectively. Fourteen Thousand, Five Hundred and Twelve (14,512) (student's scripts were the total population of the study. The sample size used was 370 using the Research Advisors (2006) table and multi stage cluster sampling as the sampling technique. The instrument used for the study was the Scripts of students in Mathematics multiple choice examinations set and administered by KERD in 2015. The study revealed that there was no significant difference in the mean difficulty and discrimination indices of the 2015 Mathematics SSCQE items for male and female students, while there is a significant difference on the guessing indices for male and female students.The paper finally recommended that Further studies on item analysis of SSCQE on mathematics and other subjects should be carried out in other zones of the state. In addition, Further studies on item analysis should be investigated on boarding school students and on mixed schools students to determine the effect of gender on the variables.

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