UNS – Undergraduate program of Chemistry Education department held the International Workshop Rasch Model in the sixth floor of Postgraduate Auditorium, Saturday (03/30/2019). This event was one of the closing series events to celebrate the 43rd anniversary of Universitas Sebelas Maret (UNS).
“Every year, the undergraduate program of Chemistry Education conducts a National Seminar of Chemistry and Chemistry Education (SNKPK). By this year, we will conduct the 11th SNKPK on April 13. Well, this workshop is one of the events that will have been done. In order to celebrate the anniversary of UNS, we hold this event at the end of March because it is not too far from April 13,” said Dr. Sri Mulyani, Head of Chemistry Education Department Faculty of Teaching Training and Education (FKIP).
Rasch Model is a psychometric model for creating measurements from categorical data, such as the answers based on the questionnaire responses, as a function of the trade-off between the respondent’s abilities, attitudes, and response. It also analyses the characteristics of personalities and item difficulty.
“Rasch Model is required because we need to measure humans who have physical and non-physical characteristics. Measuring the physical characteristics is easy by tools such as a scale to measure mass. On the other hand, there are also non-physical characteristics such as the intelligence of someone. Normally, we measure the intelligence and determine someone pass a test or not by numbers. In fact, there may be other factors that cannot be measured by numerical values, or maybe the question has a relative level of difficulty for each student. Even though, there is a lucky factor for a less-intelligence student. So, Rasch Model is applied to avoid scientific injustice,” explained one of the speakers, Bambang Sumintono Ph.D. from University of Malaya.
Mulyani added, the purpose choosing Rasch Model as the topic of this workshop was to insight the lecturers and students of Chemistry Education Department FKIP UNS in specific, as well as the non-UNS lectures and even the abroad lectures who often had to involve the questionnaires in their researches. In addition, it could contribute the productivity of scholarly articles published by the lecturers or students of UNS.
“The advantage of this model is more detailed. It not only focuses on the numeric valuing but also specific on each personality. The last final examination has already used this model. Furthermore, to be published on international journals, data management of the research needs to be considered. So far, our scholarly articles cannot be published due to data management issues. Hopefully, this workshop can encourage the UNS’ vision in the international journal publication,” she added.
The response of the participants towards this event was great. This can be seen from the participants who came from various universities. They were lecturers and postgraduate students from UNS, UNY, UII, UIN Sunan Kalijaga, UPI, Universitas Bengkulu, Universitas Tun Husein Malaysia, and many more. This was held for two days until Sunday (03/31). Humas UNS/Kaffa/Asl