Linguistic factors in Mathematics test

Rosyaida, Binti Abdul Kadir @ Ahkong (2015) Linguistic factors in Mathematics test. Masters thesis, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, (UNIMAS).

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Abstract

Written test was believed to be inefficient in measuring the ability of student in mathematics. This is because in mathematics test, it contains both numerical and word problem. In mathematics word problem, it contains the linguistic factors that resulted in the complexity of the problem. The complexity of the language in the mathematics word problem could affect the performance in mathematics. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of linguistic factor to the difficulty of mathematics test item. Content analysis was used to obtain the data from Form 5 Paper I Mathematics test that were administered in SMK Wira Penrissen in March 2015. The difficulty of the item was represented by the probability of the students answering the item correctly. The results show that out of seven linguistic factors studied, only number of symbols has a significant relationship with the difficulty of item. The difficulty of test item tends to decrease when the number of symbols increases. Further analysis was done using linear regression in order to make a prediction on the effect of linguistic factors on the difficulty of test item. The predictive equation is given by Difficulty of Test Item = 0.404 -0.09Number of Symbols. Overall, linguistic factors seem to have little impact on the difficulty of the test item. Therefore, clear language that is free of unnecessary complexity is important in designing the items for mathematics test specifically, and in mathematics learning generally.

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