Assessing Cognitive Alignment in Pre-Tertiary TVET Core Mathematics: A Ghanaian Case Study of Curriculum and Exit Examination

Mathematics plays a crucial role in pre-tertiary education, especially within STEM disciplines, where mastery of it enhances success in finance, engineering, and technology. Poor performance in the subject continues to delimit many pre-tertiary TVET learners. In our quest to find a lasting solution to this menace, many studies have been conducted to improve performance, but the problem persists in Ghana. What is yet to be done at the pre-tertiary TVET level is checking the alignment of the exit examinations with its curriculum. This study, therefore, investigates the cognitive alignment between Ghana’s pre-tertiary TVET core mathematics curriculum and its exit examinations from 2011 to 2023. Using Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) framework and Porter’s Alignment Model, this study employs a pragmatic paradigm within a mixed-methods, and a convergent parallel design was used to gather both qualitative and quantitative. Eleven out of 13 exit examinations were randomly selected for content analysis. Data collection involved researcher-designed specification tables to categorize the cognitive demand levels of both the curriculum standards and examination questions. Content validity was established using the Item-Level Content Validity Index (I-CVI), yielding values of 0.89 and 0.91. Construct validity was confirmed with convergent validity (r = 0.78) and discriminant validity (r = 0.24), while inter-rater reliability, measured using Cohen’s kappa (κ = 0.83, p < 0.000), indicated strong agreement in coding cognitive demand levels. The findings revealed that Paper 1 (multiple-choice) primarily assessed lower-order cognitive skills (DOK 1 and 2), whereas Paper 2 (constructed response) focused on higher-order thinking (DOK 2, 3, and occasionally 4). Cognitive alignment fluctuated across years, with the highest alignment index recorded in 2011 (0.819) and the lowest in 2019 (0.594). A weak positive correlation (r = 0.241, p = 0.474) between alignment and pass rate suggests that alignment alone does not strongly predict learner performance. The study recommends improving curriculum-examination alignment, ensuring a balanced representation of cognitive demand levels, and enhancing item development processes to better support learner achievement.