Quality (quantitative) and predictive relationship between internal assessment scores and student’ Performance in basic education certificate examination in the KEEA Municipality Ghana

Abstract

It is expected that students‟ performance in internal assessment at a particular grade level will not be significantly different from their performance in external assessment of the same grade level. Grounded in the expectancy theory of motivation by Vroom (1964), this study was carried out to examine the quality (quantitative) of the District Based Mock Examination and the predictive relationship between internal assessment scores and students‟ performance in the Basic Education Certificate Examination (external) for the 2019 candidates in Komenda Edina Eguafo Abrem Municipality in the Central Region of Ghana. The study adopted the Ex-post facto design and used the multistage sampling technique to select 602 out of 2,545 of the 2019 Basic Education Certificate Examination candidates. Ordinal regression was used to test the hypotheses. The findings of the study revealed that the item difficulty and discrimination indices of the District Based Mock Examination were within the recommended coefficients. However, the reliability indices of the items were deficient of the recommended coefficients (>.80). Further, with the exception of the Integrated Science, which had a significant negative predictive relationship with the BECE, the School Based Assessment for the other three core subjects did not show a significant predictive relationship with the Basic Education Certificate Examination. interestingly, all the District Based Mock Examination scores showed a significant negative predictive relationship with the Basic Education Certificate Examination. It was, therefore, suggested that the practice of the District Based Mock Examination should be sustained and regulated by Ghana Education Service while the Ghana Education Service device mechanisms to check adherence of the School Based Assessment guidelines by teachers