A Cross-curricular Analysis of the Nationwide Achievement Assessments on Science for Elementary School Students

Abstract

Of recent, cross-curricular education has achieved greater importance. The present research aimed to obtain the psychometric properties of the nationwide achievement assessments on science, reading and mathematic literacy by analyzing the response data provided by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan. The data includes all of the sixth grade (1,066,295) students in Japan in the 2018 academic year. We randomly picked up 500,000 students from the data set. The results of a factor analysis showed that the science assessment test might be assessing a combination of reading skills, mathematics skills and scientific skills, although the reading and mathematics test assessed each skill specifically. To obtain a more detailed picture, we compared the correct answer rates among 4 groups of students; the higher-scientific-higher-reading skills group, the higher-scientific-lower-reading skills group, the lower-scientific-higher-reading skills group and the lower-scientific-lower-reading skills group. The results suggested that all questions in the science assessment tests required reading skills. Moreover, in some questions, reading skills could complement scientific skills to answer them. These results suggest that we should be careful when dealing with the science assessment test; instead of just using the answer rate as the index of scientific skills, it would be better to use a weighted factor score in order to find out more about students’ achievements by assessing three skills independently.