This study examines potential assessment bias based on students' primary language status in PISA 2018. Specifically, multilingual (MLs) and nonmultilingual (non-MLs) students in the United States are compared with regard to their response time as well as scored responses across three cognitive domains (reading, mathematics, and science).…

Educational large-scale assessment (LSA) studies like the program for international student assessment (PISA) provide important information about trends in the performance of educational indicators in cognitive domains. The change in the country means in a cognitive domain like reading between two successive assessments is an example of a trend…

In this research, multistage adaptive tests (MST) were compared according to sample size, panel pattern and module length for top-down and bottom-up test assembly methods. Within the scope of the research, data from PISA 2015 were used and simulation studies were conducted according to the parameters estimated from these data. Analysis results for…

For assessment scales applied to different groups (e.g., students from different states; patients in different countries), multigroup differential item functioning (MG-DIF) needs to be evaluated in order to ensure that respondents with the same trait level but from different groups have equal response probabilities on a particular item. The…

Studies across countries part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) suggest that learners' sense of school belonging is often influenced by their place of birth. However, large-scale assessment studies rarely explore whether differences in belonging scores between non-immigrant and immigrant learners are due to test…

PISA is an influential international study of the achievement of 15-year-olds. It has a high profile across the devolved nations of the UK, with the results having a substantial impact upon education policy. Yet many of the technical details underpinning PISA remain poorly understood--particularly amongst non-specialists--including important…

The waning interest of students in science became a global concern. The purpose of this research was to translate, adapt, and validate the My Attitude toward Science [MATS] questionnaire instrument, which was used to measure students' attitudes toward science in the Indonesian context. We also investigated the items that contributed to gender and…

This study evaluated differential item functioning (DIF) in achievement motivation items before and after using anchoring vignettes as a statistical tool to account for group differences in response styles across gender and ethnicity. We applied the nonparametric scoring of the vignettes to motivation items from the 2015 Programme for…

Conducting a fair test is important for educational research. Unfair assessments can lead to gender disparities in academic achievement, ultimately resulting in disparities in opportunities, wages, and career choice. Differential Item Function [DIF] analysis is presented to provide evidence of whether the test is truly fair, where it does not harm…

One of the primary goals of international large-scale assessments in education is the comparison of country means in student achievement. This article introduces a framework for discussing differential item functioning (DIF) for such mean comparisons. We compare three different linking methods: concurrent scaling based on full invariance,…

The aim of this study is to investigate the presence of DIF over the gender variable with the latent class modeling approach. The data were collected from 953 students who participated in the PISA 2018 8th-grade financial literacy assessment in the USA. Latent Class Analysis (LCA) approach was used to identify the latent classes, and the data fit…

The Mantel-Haenszel estimator is one of the most popular techniques for measuring differential item functioning (DIF). A generalization of this estimator is applied to the context of DIF to compare items by taking the covariance of odds ratio estimators between dependent items into account. Unlike the Item Response Theory, the method does not rely…

We investigated the potential impact of differential item functioning (DIF) on group-level mean and standard deviation estimates using empirical and simulated data in the context of large-scale assessment. For the empirical investigation, PISA 2018 cognitive domains (Reading, Mathematics, and Science) data were analyzed using Jackknife sampling to…

International large-scale assessment in education aims to compare educational achievement across many countries. Differences between countries in language, culture, and education give rise to differential item functioning (DIF). For many decades, DIF has been regarded as a nuisance and a threat to validity. In this paper, we take a different…

According to PISA 2012, mathematics self-beliefs involve three dimensions: mathematics self-efficacy, mathematics self-concept and mathematics anxiety. This study utilized the multiple indicators, multiple causes (MIMIC) method, an approach for detecting whether there is a lack of measurement invariance or differential item functioning (DIF), to…