Indonesian National Assessment for Madrasah Students: The Analysis of Different Types of Numeracy Test Items

The types of questions can influence students' responses and the characteristics of the items, such as the index of difficulty and the index of discrimination. Hence, more studies on using various types of questions are worth doing to better understand how test takers answer and complete the questions in various forms. This research aims to reveal students' difficulties in doing various types of questions in numeracy tests and further investigate the students' difficulties with the types of questions that students mostly gave the wrong answers. The sample was 1,773 students out of 297,257 fifth graders of Islamic schools participating in the Indonesian Madrasah Competency Assessment in 2022 administered by the Ministry of Religious Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia. The instruments were
question items in five types, with texts as the stimuli. The data analyses used descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and t-tests. The findings are: (a) numeracy questions using matching and short answers have the lowest response, i.e., most students find them challenging, and (2) the difficulty with matching type can potentially be caused by the lack of practice during the learning process while with the short answer type may be due to the application system. The findings imply that teachers and Islamic schools need to give students more practice to help them get accustomed to these types of question items. Examples, assignments or projects for homework with various types of
questions may facilitate students to get familiarized with various types of questions. Students also need more practice with short answer questions to enable them to do the questions based on the rules.