Traditionally, women and minorities have not been fully represented in science and engineering. Numerous studies have attributed these differences to gaps in science achievement as measured by various standardized tests. Rather than describe mean group differences in science achievement across multiple cultures, this study focused on an in-depth…

There are at least two procedures to assess item difficulty stability in the Rasch model: robust z procedure and "0.3 Logit Difference" procedure. The robust z procedure is a variation of the z statistic that reduces dependency on outliers. The "0.3 Logit Difference" procedure is based on experiences in Rasch linking for tests developed by…

Developed school versus benchmark comparison reports based on groups of easily comparable school types for Queensland, Australia schools. The state benchmark for each set of comparable schools estimated how easy it was, on average, for members of the benchmark group (parents or students) to endorse each of the School Opinion Survey Likert-scale…

Validated the Motivation Orientation scales of the Inventory of School Motivation (ISM) (M. Maher, 1984) across Navajo (n=760) and Anglo (n=1,012) students. Findings show that even though the ISM motivation orientation scales are applicable to students of different cultural backgrounds, meaningful cross-cultural comparisons should use the 30 items…

Used Monte Carlo simulation to compare the relative measurement efficiency of polytomous modeling and dichotomous modeling under different scoring schemes and termination criteria. Results suggest that polytomous computerized adaptive testing (CAT) yields marginal gains over dichotomous CAT when termination criteria are more stringent. Discusses…