Item Analysis

Item analysis is a statistical technique which is

used for selecting and rejecting the items of the
test on basis of their difficulty value and
discrimanted power or Discrimination Index
 Item Analysis
Meaning and Purpose of Item Analysis
1. Item analysis indicates which items are
difficult,easy,moderately difficult or moderately easy.
2. It provides indices of the ability of the item to discriminate
between inferior and superior in other words indicates the
discrimination value of each item
3. It indicates the effectiveness of the distractors in the
multple-choice items
4. It sometimes also indicates why a particular item in the test
has not functioned effectively
 Objectives of item analysis

• To select the items for the final draft

• To obtain the information of the difficulty level
(DV)of all the items
• To provide the discrimination Index(DI) of items
• To provide modifications of some items
• To prepare the final draft of easy to (difficult items)
 Writing test items – guidelines
► Define clearly
► Generate a pool of potential items
► Monitor reading level
► Use unitary items
► Avoid long items
► Break any response “set”
Writing test items – guidelines

A. Define clearly →Why are you

testing?
→What do you want
to know?
Writing test items – guidelines
B. Generate a pool of →The larger the pool of
potential items items you select from,
the better the test
→Selection from this
pool based on item-
analysis
Writing test items – guidelines

C. Monitor reading level →level too low?

→more sophisticated test-
takers may get bored
→level too high?
→you’re testing reading
skill as well as domain
you think you’re testing
Writing test items – guidelines
D. Use unitary items →Then the meaning of
the response is clear
Writing test items – guidelines

E. Avoid long items →Longer items are

more likely to be mis-
interpreted by test-
takers
→Short items are more
likely to be unitary
Break any response “set”
→Use reverse-scored
F. Break any response items to prevent test-
“set” taker’s from getting
into a response set
such as just responding
“5” for every item on a
Likert scale
 Difficulty value(DV) or Difficulty Index

“The Difficulty Value of an item is defined as

proportion or percentage of examinees who have
answered items correctly”
- Guiford(1951)
 Interpretation of DV
→Low difficulty value means, that the item is high
difficulty one
→Example: DV=.20 -----> 20% only answered
correctly for that item. so the item is difficult.
→High difficulty value means, that item is an easy
one.
Example: DV=.80 ------> 80% answered correctly
to that item. so the item is too easy one.
 DV Item Evaluation
0.20 - 0.30 Most Difficult
0.30 - 0.40 Difficult
0.40 - 0.60 Moderately Difficult
0.60 - 0.70 Easy
0.70 - 0.90 Most Easy
Discrimination Index ( DI)

“ Index of discrimination is that ability of an

item on the basis of which the discrimination
is made between superiors or inferiors” -
Blood & Budd (1972)
Calculate Difficulty value(DV) or Difficulty Index

ITEM Pupils(Respondents)
A B C D
#1 0 3 24* 3

#2 12* 13 3 2
* Denotes correct answer
 Forumla:

→Number of Correct Answer Divided by Number

of Respondents
Example of the previous table 24%30 = .80
"rule-of-thumb" is that if the item difficulty is
more than .75, it is an easy item.
If the difficulty is below .25, it is a difficult item.
 Discrimination Index (DI)
→Refers to how well an assessment differentiates
between high and low scorers.
→If supriors score high on more items compare
low scorers than it is positive discrimination.
→If Inferiors score high on more items compare
high scorers than it is Negative discrimination.
Example: 27% upper and 27% lower group.
Note: that the students are arranged with the top
overall scorers at the top of the table
ITEMS
Student Total Score (%)
1 2 3
1 90 1 0 1
2 90 1 0 1
3 80 0 0 1
4 80 1 0 1
5 70 1 0 1
6 60 1 0 0
7 60 1 0 1
8 50 1 1 0
9 50 1 1 0
10 40 0 1 0
→"1" indicates the answer was correct; "0" indicates it
was incorrect.
Follow these steps to determine the Difficulty Value and
the Discrimination Index.
1. After the students are arranged with the highest
overall scores at the top, count the number of students
in the upper and lower group who got each item correct.
For ITEM #1, there were 4 students in the top half who
got it correct and 4 students in the bottom half.
2.Determine the Difficulty Value by dividing the number
who got it correct by the total number of students. For
ITEM #1, this would be 8/10 or p=.80.
3. Determine the Discrimination Index by subtracting the
number of students in the lower group who got the item
correct from the number of students in the upper group
who got the item correct.
4. Then, divide by the number of students in each group
(in this case, there are five in each group). For ITEM #1,
that means you would subtract 4 from 4, and divide by 5,
which results in a Discrimination Index of 0.
The answers for ITEM 1

#
# Correct Discrimin
Correct Difficulty
Items (Lower ation
(Upper (p)
group) Index (D)
group)

ITEM # 1 4 4 .80 0
Ebel and Frisbie (1986) give us the following rule for
determining thequality of the items
D= Quality Recommendations
> 0.39 Excellent Retain
0.30 – 0.39 Good Possibilities for
improvement
0.20 – 0.29 Mediocre Need to check/review

0.00 – 0.20 Poor Discard or review in

depth
< -0.01 Worst Definitely discard