Abstract:

In 2008 the Polish educational system underwent a major reform, which consisted in introducing a new Science Curriculum. The Curriculum proposes a new educational approach emphasizing especially reasoning skills and critical thinking skills. The present work focused on developing new reasoning skills assessing tools for Polish students at ISCED 2 stage. Large scale tests in Polish schools were performed in order to evaluate the quality of those tools and to eliminate ambiguous or misleading items. For each item a special graph was prepared and analyzed, in which pupils were divided in ten groups depending on their score gained throughout the test. Subsequently for each single item, the average score in each centile group was checked. Selected exemplary tools as well as items statistics (exact results of the item discrimination and the item easiness indexes for these tools in the performed test) will be presented.

Keywords:

Reasoning skills, assessment, educational tool, item discrimination, item easiness index.