Development and Validation of Instrument for Assessing Students Practical Skills in Building Super-Structure Operations in Nigerian Secondary Schools

Abstract

The aim of the study is to develop and validate an instrument for assessing students’ practical skills in building super-structure operations in Nigerian secondary schools. Five research questions guided the study. The study adopted instrumentation design. The area of the study was Taraba State. The population for the study was 107 comprising 82 final year senior secondary school building construction students, 18 building construction teachers and seven professional builders. The sample size for the study was 47 which comprised all the 22 students offering building construction subject at Government Technical Training School, Jalingo, All the 18 teachers and the seven professional builders. The instrument used for data collection was Building Super-structure Practical Skills Assessment Instrument (BSPSAI). The instrument was face validated by three experts. Content validation was carried out using a table of specifications based on Simpson’s model of psychomotor domain. Factor Analysis was used to determine the construct validity of the instrument and a benchmark of 0.35 was pegged as an index for acceptance of an item. Mean was used to select the specific performance objectives of the instrument. The developed instrument was tried out on the 22 students offering building construction subject at Government technical Training School, Jalingo. Findings from the study indicated that 6 practical task items, 88 practical skill items, and five performance objectives were found to be appropriate for inclusion in the instrument. All the 6 practical task items and the 88 practical skill items were found to be valid. The internal consistency of the instrument was found to be 0.81 while the interrater reliability coefficient of the developed instrument was 0.80, indicating that there was a high degree of agreement among all the four raters used in the study. Based on the findings, it was recommended among others that the major examination bodies should ensure that practical task and skill items of all the major operations found in building construction curriculum are included in their instrument for the conduct of terminal examinations. NERDC should ensure that appropriate and comprehensive guidelines on methods of assessing building construction subject are embedded in the curriculum for proper guidelines.