Predictive Validity of Basic Education Certificate Examination Compulsory Cross-Cutting Subjects in Senior School Examination in Kwara State, Nigeria

Abstract

A justification for using any test result for its intended purpose is the ability of the items to

measure the earlier set objectives which is construed as validity; a psychometric property of a

good test cannot be over emphasized. The predictive strength of the Basic Education Certificate

Examination Cross-cutting subjects in predicting students’ performance in both internal Senior

Secondary School I, Senior Secondary School II, and external examination (Senior Secondary

Certificate Examination) in Kwara State was examined in this paper. The study employed

longitudinal and ex-post-facto design. The population of this study consists of senior secondary

students in Science, Art and Commercial departments that sat for the compulsory cross-cutting

subjects in Basic Education Certificate Examination, internal promotional examination both in

Senior Secondary School I, Senior Secondary School II and as well as Senior Secondary School

Certificate Examination in Kwara State between 2015/2016 – 2018/2019 academic sessions.

Purposive random sampling technique was employed to sample 1200 [712 (59.3%) male and 488 Impact: Journal of Transformation Vol. 7 (2) 2024, ISSN 2617-5576

(40.7%) female] students that have complete records of their scores across the years. Proforma

was used to collect the respondents’ scores and were transformed to continuous form. The Basic

Education Certificate Examination and Senior Secondary Certificate Examination are

standardized examinations; hence the results are assumed to be satisfactory. However, scores

from teacher made tests/internal promotional examinations were standardised (t-score). The

collected data were analysed with simple linear regression. Findings show that the Basic

Education Certificate Examinations were a good performance predictor for the Senior Secondary

Certificate Examinations. The study recommended that the general public and stakeholders retain

their trust in and embrace the Basic Education Certificate Examination as a strong predictor of

students' academic performance.