The Construction of historical empathy Test of first year undergraduate student Applying Polytomous Item Response Theory

Abstract

The purposes of this research were 1) to construct a historical empathy test for the first-year undergraduate students, 2) to analyze the quality of the historical empathy test for the first-year undergraduate students by applying the polytomous item response theory, and 3) to create a handbook and common criteria for the historical empathy test for the first-year undergraduate students. The samples used in this research were 800 first-year undergraduate students studying in Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. The research instrument was a situation test with five- multiple choice questions. The statistics were used to analyze quality based on the original item response theory and the polytomous item response theory.

The research findings were as follows:

1. The finding of the quality of the test measured by the analysis of the components of the test was at the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin of 0.981. the important component component was extracted by rotating the whole component’s core of one component successfully. The examination of the unidimensional basic agreement was found that the historical empathy of the three components had the unique dimension
2. The findings of the quality of the test showed that the joint slope parameter was ranging from 1.67 to 2.15 which could be organized as <<<. The analysis of the information function of the test showed that the test gave the highest information when the students had the ability from the moderate level to the high level.
3. The handbook of the historical empathy test was used at the highest level. The common criteria of the history empathy test had the raw scores ranging from 36 to 180 and t-score ranging from T₄₆ to T₇₀