For more than seventy-five years, standardized tests have been considered a vital tool for gauging students' readiness for college. However, few people--including students, parents, teachers, and policy makers--understand how tests like the SAT or ACT are used in admissions decisions. Once touted as the best way to compare students from diverse…

Validity and reliability are among the most crucial characteristics of a test. One of the steps to make sure that a test is valid and reliable is to examine the bias in test items. The purpose of this study was to examine the bias in 2012 Placement Test items in terms of gender variable using Rasch Model in Turkey. The sample of this study was…

We provide a tutorial on differential item functioning (DIF) analysis, an analytic method useful for identifying potentially biased items in assessments. After explaining a number of methodological approaches, we test for gender bias in two scenarios that demonstrate why DIF analysis is crucial for developing assessments, particularly because…

Several attempts have been made to measure and categorize beliefs and practices of mathematics teachers [Swan, M. 2006. "Designing and Using Research Instruments to Describe the Beliefs and Practices of Mathematics Teachers." "Research in Education" 75 (1): 58-70]. One of the reasons for measuring both beliefs and practices is…

We investigated the extent to which the observed gender differences in mental rotation ability among the 2,468 freshmen studying engineering at a Midwest public university attributed to the gender bias of a test. The Revised Purdue Spatial Visualization Tests: Visualization of Rotations (Revised PSVT:R) is a spatial test frequently used to measure…

The psychometric properties of a 10-item math motivation scale were empirically validated with an independent sample consisting of 182 elementary-school students. Analysis of the model dimensionality supported a one-factor structure fit. Item parameter estimates from a Classical Test Theory framework revealed that most items were highly…

Differential Item Functioning (DIF) exists when examinees of equal ability from different groups have different probabilities of successful performance in a certain item. This study examined gender differential item functioning across the PhD Entrance Exam of TEFL (PEET) in Iran, using both logistic regression (LR) and one-parameter item response…

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced) strives to provide every student with a positive and productive assessment experience, generating results that are a fair and accurate estimate of each student's achievement. Further, Smarter Balanced is building on a framework of accessibility for all students, including English…

Students' performance in assessments is commonly attributed to more or less effective teaching. This implies that students' responses are significantly affected by instruction. However, the assumption that outcome measures indeed are instructionally sensitive is scarcely investigated empirically. In the present study, we propose a…

The study investigates consequences of eliminating items showing gender-specific differential item functioning (DIF) on the psychometric structure of a standard RIASEC interest inventory. Holland's hexagonal model was tested for structural invariance using a confirmatory methodological approach (confirmatory factor analysis and randomization…

The purpose of the present study was to develop and evaluate two procedures flagging consequential item parameter drift (IPD) in an operational testing program. The first procedure was based on flagging items that exhibit a meaningful magnitude of IPD using a critical value that was defined to represent barely tolerable IPD. The second procedure…

Couched within a larger critique of assessment practices and how they are used to stigmatize African American children, the authors examine teachers' instructional practices in response to demands of increasing test scores. Many mathematics teachers might be unaware of how these test-driven instructional practices can simultaneously reflect…

This document describes the features of a statewide summative science assessment that has been designed to embody standards based on the "Framework for K-12 Science Education," such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)--to reflect its intent, grounded in the specific expectations of three-dimensional standards. Importantly,…

Rasch mixture models can be a useful tool when checking the assumption of measurement invariance for a single Rasch model. They provide advantages compared to manifest differential item functioning (DIF) tests when the DIF groups are only weakly correlated with the manifest covariates available. Unlike in single Rasch models, estimation of Rasch…

We evaluate the item response theory with covariates (IRT-C) procedure for assessing differential item functioning (DIF) without preknowledge of anchor items (Tay, Newman, & Vermunt, 2011). This procedure begins with a fully constrained baseline model, and candidate items are tested for uniform and/or nonuniform DIF using the Wald statistic.…