Item Psychometric Properties and Students' Academic Performance: An Analysis of 2022 Mathematics Placement Examinations in Hadejia Town, Jigawa State

The study aimed at investigating item difficulty level and discrimination power of 2022 Mathematics Placement Examinations in Hadejia Town, Jigawa State, with a view to find out mean differences in facility index and Discrimination power ability of the items in the Examination between male and female students. The population of the study consist of all students who sat for Mathematics Placement Examinations in Hadejia Town in the year 2022. A sample of 382 students was drawn from the population, and multi-stage cluster sampling technique was used in drawing the sample. The instrument of the study is the student’s marked scripts. Data analysis was carried out by the researcher using SPSS to obtain item difficulty indices and discrimination power indices. Findings from the study revealed that 23.33% of the items were of poor difficulty level and 46.67% were poor in terms of discrimination power ability. In the same vein, the results indicated no significant difference in mean difficulty level and discrimination power ability between Male and Female students in Hadejia Town, Jigawa State. It’s recommended that item analysis should be encouraged in test development stage of Placement Examinations, and test expert should be employed mainly for construction and analysis of the items.