This study investigated attitudes of teachers towards the application of item response theory (IRT) in the technical colleges in Rivers State. It is intended to ascertain the influence of these teacher-related factors on testing processes using IRT in these institutions. Five research questions were asked to guide this study and five null hypotheses were formulated and tested. Cross-sectional survey research design was adopted in this study. The population of this study comprised all the 424 technical teachers in the 15 technical colleges in Rivers State. The study used stratified random sampling technique to draw the sample of size of 212 out of the population. The instrument for data collection was a self-designed Likert type (five response level) questionnaire titled,“Survey of Teacher’s Attitudes Towards Application of Item Response Theory (STATA-IRT), with a reliability coefficient of .86. Correlation analysis was used to answer the research questions and multiple regressions, R, was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 alpha level. It was found from the overall result, that strong linear relationship exists between attitudes of teachers and the application of Item Response Theory in Technical colleges Rivers State. It was also found from the multiple regression results that the attitudes of teachers are predictors of effective application of item response theory in the technical colleges in Rivers state.
Keywords: Application of Item, Attitudes, Response Theory, Rivers State, Teachers, Technical Colleges
