The Development of Instruments to Identify Basic Mathematics Understanding of New Students of FMIPA Syiah Kuala University

This study aims to identify basic mathematics skills and understanding of new students of FMIPA Unsyiah. Prior to the beginning of August 2015, the research team developed an instrument to identify the basic skills of new students of FMIPA Unsyiah. The questions included in the instrument are developed based on some anecdotal or empirical input about students' misconceptions in some Basic Mathematics concepts. In this article, we will report the process of developing the instrument as well as the results of psychometric analysis performed to measure the quality of the developed instruments. Classical test theory analysis results reported in this article include the values of the point bi-serial indices and the difficulty indices obtained based on the student responses on the instrument. The data was obtained from the first administration participated by 325 new students. The result of item analysis shows that the point bi-serial indices of items in this instrument ranges from 0.269 up to 0.582 with difficulty indices ranging from 0.16 up to 0.92. The results indicate that items in this instrument can discriminate students' ability well and can measure students' ability from every level of ability, but revisions are still needed to improve it.