Teacher's Perception towards Psychometrics Analysis Software

The turn of the century witnessed a move to decentralise public summative examinations in Malaysia. The new global move in assessment has also paved the way to more formative teacher made tests. This paradigm shift towards more teacher made tests and school-based assessment has not only led to an increased workload for teachers but has put forward a critical demand for greater accountability in terms of more valid, reliable and quality assessments. The change would require better item development, enhanced item management and correct item analysis to ensure students are being assessed fairly. Unfortunately, item development, management and analysis is a time consuming endeavour. Teachers as test setters not only need to master the skill of constructing valid and reliable items but more importantly they need to be able to determine the difficulty level of each item to ensure a test will not be too difficult or easy for their students. In order to ensure teachers are able to prepare high quality classroom based tests teachers need to be provided with user friendly item development and analysis software. To ease this difficult process, the researchers in this study have taken the initiative to invent an item analysis software referred to as SuperSeTIA (Super Specific e-Tool for Item Analysis) and has been tested with a group of teachers from four different states in Malaysia. Their feedback towards the effectiveness of this psychometric analysis software had provided researchers relevant information to further improve the development of this software in terms of ease of use, user interface, audience appeal, effectiveness, presentation, program content and documentation and supplementary materials.