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Development and Validation of New Objective Knowledge Tests in STEM Field for Primary School Students

Measuring student achievement is one of the key issues when researching quality and efficiency of an educational system. Several existing studies tried to express student achievement in mathematics or science through separate tests within the particular domain. The aim of this paper is to consider the possibility of measuring knowledge in STEM area through integrated tests and to present the characteristics of the new tests developed particularly for this purpose. In this paper, a complete psychometric analysis of newly developed tests is provided. The paper provides the steps undertaken in the process of determining the content requirements within each knowledge test, preliminary validations of initial test versions, as well as the results obtained in the main study. The main study encompassed 586 students from grade 4, 580 students from grade 5 and 632 students from grade 6. In every test the unidimensional structure was obtained using confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses. Acceptable reliability was obtained for all three tests (α4th = .78 ; α5th =.70 ; α6th = .79). The correlations between total test scores and achievement in STEM school subjects were moderate to high. We can conclude that all three newly developed tests represent a one-dimensional, reliable, discriminative and valid measure of integrated students’ knowledge in STEM area.

knowledge ; STEM achievement ; test development

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