Independent schools are, for the most part, exempt from mandatory participation in standardized tests designed for state and federal comparisons, nor are they required to take part in comparative international assessments. The anxiety in the broader culture, however, is driving a growing interest among independent school parents (and prospective…

ACT college test publisher provided scores. On average, non-homeschoolers performed better than homeschoolers, by about two items, out of sixty items, on the ACT mathematics test that was analyzed. This result may be due to the different teaching/learning media used in teaching each of the two groups, to different teacher/student interaction, or…

Previous research has shown that testlet structures often violate important assumptions of dichotomous item response theory (D-IRT) models, applied to item-level scores, that can in turn affect the results of many measurement applications. In this situation, polytomous IRT (P-IRT) models, applied to testlet-level scores, have been used as an…

Whether boys and girls perform differently on mathematics estimation items with a picture format (applied context [AC] items) compared with items with a numbers-only (NC) format was studied when effects of computational skill, conceptual knowledge, and quantitative ability were controlled. Subjects were approximately 80,000 students from grades 4…

The content of selected major achievement tests is examined for bias in the frequency of references to the male and the female sex. The performance of males and females is contrasted on each item considered, and the relationships between item content and the performance differences is surveyed. The tests used in this study include the Metropolitan…