The Construction of Mathematics Diagnostic Tests in Topic of Sequence and Series for Grade 11 Students in Schools under the Srisaket’s Provincial Administrator Organization

Abstract

The purposes of this research were to 1) create a diagnostic tests in topic of sequence and series for grade 11 students in schools under the Srisaket’s provincial administrator organization, 2) verify the quality of the created tests in their content validity, difficulty, discrimination and, the reliability of tests and, 3) study the student’s mistaken in mathematics course in topic of “sequence and series for grade 11 students in schools under the Srisaket’s provincial administrator organization. The sample used in this research were 440 grade 11 students in schools under the Srisaket’s provincial administrator organization who were enrolled in second semester of academic year 2017 which were obtained by using Muti-Stage Random Sampling technique. The research instruments were created from the subjective test for exploring learning mistakes 5 issues then created dummies from the mistakes in diagnostic test. After that, conducted the test 3 times in which the first and the second time used with 100 samples. The passed test items in each time of the test were selected and reused in the next test for finding the difficulty and discrimination in each test item. The passed test items were gathered and used in the third test which had 5 issues consisted of 10 items in each test. The third test was taken by 440 samples then the data was analyzed to find out the quality of the test in content validity, difficulty, discrimination and, reliability of the whole test. Statistics used in the data analysis were percentage, average and, standard deviation. The research results were as follow: 1. The diagnostic tests in topic of sequence and series for grade 11 students were multiple choice with 4 choices, 10 items per issue and, totally 5 issues. The content in the first issue was knowledge of the sequence, the second issue was arithmetic sequence, the third issue was geometric sequence, the forth issue was arithmetic series and, the fifth issue was geometric series. Therefore, the whole diagnostic test had totally 50 items. 2. All of 5 issues had the difficulty in each item between 0.53 – 0.66, the discrimination in each item between 0.26–0.94, the binomial reliability of each issues ranged from 0.78, 0.76, 0.73, 0.77, and 0.75, the content validity of each mathematics diagnostic tests issues had the index of item – objective congruence (IOC) ranged from 0.8 – 1.00, the cutting point calculated by using Glass’s method of all diagnostic test were 3, 4, 3, 4, and 5 and, the percentage of passed students in each test issue were 94.09, 74.77, 63.64, 67.72 and 62.73 respectively. 3. The analysis of the most student’s mistakes in the diagnostic tests in topic of sequence and serial found that the student did not understand the process of finding the general in term “n” of the sequence and lack of understanding of the calculation formula (S_n) of arithmetic series