Public schools in the U.S. today are educating more students from language and racial/ethnic minority backgrounds and from lower socioeconomic groups. Schools, however, have a long history of providing inequitable educational opportunities that disadvantage low income students and students of color who are increasingly segregated in under-funded…

The Self-Determination Inventory: Student Report (SDI: SR) was developed to measure the self-determination of adolescents and was recently validated for students aged 13-22 with and without disabilities across diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds. The SDI: SR is aligned Causal Agency Theory and its theoretical conceptualizations of self-determined…

The State of Washington requires school districts to file court petitions on students with excessive unexcused absences. The "Washington Assessment of Risks and Needs of Students" (WARNS), a self-report screening instrument developed for use by high school and juvenile court personnel in such situations, purports to measure six facets of…

A recent, widely publicized scandal involved students who obtained fraudulent diagnoses of learning disabilities in an effort to get accommodations on college admissions tests. Although the exact circumstances of the scandal are unusual, the methods used to obtain diagnoses and accommodations illustrate widespread problems with current policies.…

One of the major claims of the report of University of California's Task Force on Standardized Testing is that SAT and ACT scores are superior to high-school grades in predicting how students will perform at UC. This finding has been widely reported in the news media and cited in several editorials favoring UC's continued use of SAT/ACT scores in…

Despite the often-negative discussion about testing in schools, assessments are a necessary and useful tool in the teaching and learning process. This is especially true when it comes to diagnostic and formative assessments, which give teachers real-time direction for what students need to learn to master course content. It is this space where the…

The use of internal assessment within GCSE qualifications has always aroused controversy, primarily because of concerns about the authorship of students' work. This has led to tighter controls and a reduction in its use over the last decade. The paper argues that the focus on the authentication of student work has neglected other aspects of…

Although language test-takers have been the focus of much theoretical and empirical work in recent years, this work has been mainly concerned with their attitudes to test preparation and test-taking strategies, giving insufficient attention to their views on broader socio-political and ethical issues. This article examines test-takers' perceptions…

This study reports an independent investigation of the psychometric properties of Desired Results Developmental Profile (DRDP), a teacher-rated measure of school readiness for preschool-aged children. In a sample of 2,031 low-income, 3- to 5-year-old children attending Head Start, we tested three measurement models: a higher order one-factor…

SIBTEST is a differential item functioning (DIF) detection method that is accurate and effective with small samples, in the presence of group mean differences, and for assessment of both uniform and nonuniform DIF. The presence of multilevel data with DIF detection has received increased attention. Ignoring such structure can inflate Type I error.…

In this study, it is aimed to investigate the impact of different missing data handling methods on the detection of Differential Item Functioning methods (Mantel Haenszel and Standardization methods based on Classical Test Theory and Likelihood Ratio Test method based on Item Response Theory). In this regard, on the data acquired from 1046…

The purpose of this ITEMS module is to provide an introduction to differential item functioning (DIF) analysis using mixture item response models. The mixture item response models for DIF analysis involve comparing item profiles across latent groups, instead of manifest groups. First, an overview of DIF analysis based on latent groups, called…

Does participation in one wave of a survey have an effect on respondents' answers to questions in subsequent waves? In this article, we investigate the presence and magnitude of "panel conditioning" effects in one of the most frequently used data sets in the social sciences: the General Social Survey (GSS). Using longitudinal records…

Within polytomous items, differential item functioning (DIF) can take on various forms due to the number of response categories. The lack of invariance at this level is referred to as differential step functioning (DSF). The most common DSF methods in the literature are the adjacent category log odds ratio (AC-LOR) estimator and cumulative…

Disability-as-diagnosis, disability-as-identity, and disability-as-experience as pressing measurement issues in learning outcomes assessment are described in this paper. Disability represents a critically important latent variable in many learning outcomes assessment plans unless it is a formalized part of analytic plans. Noting the potential for…