Development and Validation of New Objective School Achievement Tests in the STEM Field for Primary School Students

Measuring student achievement is one of the key issues when researching quality and efficiency of an educational system. Several existing studies tried to express student achievement in mathematics or science through separate tests within the particular domain. The aim of this paper is to consider the possibility of measuring knowledge in the STEM area through integrated tests and to present the characteristics of the new tests developed particularly for this purpose. In this paper, a complete psychometric analysis of the newly developed tests is provided. The paper outlines the steps undertaken in the process of determining content requirements within each knowledge test, preliminary validations of initial test versions, as well as the results obtained in the main study. The main study encompassed 586 grade 4 students, 580 grade 5 students and 632 grade 6 students. In every test, the unidimensional structure was obtained using confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses. Acceptable reliability was obtained for all three tests (alpha(4th)=.78; alpha(5th)=.70; alpha(6th)=.79). The correlations between total test scores and achievement in STEM school subjects were moderate to high. Therefore, all three newly developed tests represent a one-dimensional, reliable, discriminative and valid measure of integrated students' knowledge in the STEM area.