Construction and standardization of an achievement test of biological science for class IX students

The paper presents the details of the development and standardization of the test of achievement in Biology for IX standard students. The items were prepared from the content of the biology textbooks of IX standard on the basis of the objectives of teaching; knowledge, understanding and application in biology at secondary stage. The test which initially consisted of 262 items were given to subject experts for their valuable suggestions and corrections to ensure its quality. Thus the content validity of the tool was established. Item analysis was done by calculating the difficulty index level and discriminative power for each of the items. Based on the analysis, 70 items were retained and those items were selected for the final study. The test-retest method was used to establish the reliability of the tool and it was found to be 0.75.