ABSTRACT
By analyzing the test, we can gain information on how well we did teaching the concepts. Test items can tell us many things about student performance. We can analyze our classroom tests at several levels. The first level of analysis involves examining the test as a whole. The second level for evaluating a test is to perform an item analysis. Item difficulty is a rather straightforward concept—it is simply reported as the proportion of students who answered the item correctly. A test item should differentiate between students who are well prepared for the exam and those students who are less prepared. The better-prepared students should be able to answer the item correctly more often than the less-prepared students. It turns out that, frequently, items that are moderately difficult better differentiate between well-prepared and less-prepared students than items that are either very difficult or items that are very easy.
