Psychometric construction of a science teacher professional competency tryout: Supporting teacher certification readiness in Indonesia

Abstract

Background-This study addresses the persistently low pass rate on the Teacher Professional Education Competency Exam (UKP-PPG) among prospective science teachers in Indonesia. This low pass rate has been largely attributed to inadequate preparation and limited mastery of the subject matter. Objective-The study aims to develop a valid, reliable, and feasible pilot test (TO) as an evaluation tool to assess the readiness of prospective science teachers prior to taking the UKP-PPG. Method-Using a research and development approach based on the ADDIE framework, this study involved 857 participants with diverse demographic and occupational backgrounds, including gender and province as demographic data, and teaching level as occupational data. The researchers developed 35 items underwent psychometric analysis covering validity, reliability, difficulty level, discrimination power, and distractor effectiveness (DE). Results-Results indicated 20 valid items (α = 0.793, high reliability), with difficulty levels dominated by the easy category and varied DE across items. Furthermore, 61.6% of participants achieved high scores. Conclusion-These findings confirm that the developed TO instrument possesses high psychometric quality and is suitable for use as a diagnostic tool to accurately and reliably measure the readiness of prospective science teachers.