Development, Pilot Testing and Preliminary Psychometric Evaluation of an Achievement Test for Assessing Pre-Service Teachers’ Knowledge of Inclusive Education in Nagaland

Most existing empirical instruments in inclusive education evaluate teacher attitudes and self-efficacy rather than actual pedagogical content knowledge. This gap is particularly pronounced in Nagaland due to a dearth of psychometrically validated achievement tests which evaluates pre-service teachers’ content mastery within the state’s prescribed curriculum. To address this deficit, this study developed and pilot-tested an objective achievement test using an instrumentation design grounded in Classical Test Theory and Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy. An initial pool of 60 items, based on Nagaland University’s B.Ed. Course-10 curriculum underwent expert review for content validity prior to pilot administration. The pilot sample comprised of 42 M.Ed. students from Nagaland University’s Kohima Campus, the only institution offering the M.Ed. programme in the state. Item analysis evaluated difficulty indices, item discrimination and internal consistency. This resulted in removal of 10 poorly performing items, raising Cronbach’s alpha from .641 to .727 for the refined 50-item version. The refined 50-item instrument maintains balanced representation across five content domains and five cognitive levels, with items operating at the application and analysis levels showing the strongest discrimination indices. The resulting instrument provides teacher educators with a preliminary diagnostic measure to identify specific conceptual gaps in inclusive education preparation, with implications for B.Ed. program design under NEP 2020. These findings offer preliminary evidence of item functioning and internal consistency rather than full validation and require further validation with a larger and more representative sample. It also establishes a replicable methodological framework for similar tool development in other Northeast Indian states.

Inclusive education, achievement test development, pilot testing, psychometric evaluation, pre-service teachers, item analysis

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