Although International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement-pioneered international large-scale assessment (ILSA) of education is now a well-established science, non-practitioners and many users often substantially misunderstand how large-scale assessments are conducted, what questions and challenges they are designed to…

A variety of differential item functioning (DIF) methods have been proposed and used for ensuring that a test is fair to all test takers in a target population in the situations of, for example, a test being translated to other languages. However, once a method flags an item as DIF, it is difficult to conclude that the grouping variable (e.g.,…

For the international Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS2007) math and science motivation scales (self-concept, positive affect, and value), we evaluated the psychometric properties (factor structure, method effects, gender differences, and convergent and discriminant validity) in 4 Arab-speaking countries (Saudi Arabia,…

This report reviews the major international and regional large-scale educational assessments, including international surveys, school-based surveys and household-based surveys. The report compares and contrasts the cognitive and contextual data collection instruments and implementation methods used by the different assessments in order to identify…