Standardizing aspects of assessments has long been recognized as a tactic to help make evaluations of examinees fair. It reduces variation in irrelevant aspects of testing procedures that could advantage some examinees and disadvantage others. However, recent attention to making assessment accessible to a more diverse population of students…

We estimated the invariance of educational achievement (EA) and learning attitudes (LA) measures across nations. A multi-group confirmatory factor analysis was used to estimate the invariance of educational achievement and learning attitudes across 55 nations (Programme for International Student Assessment [PISA] 2006 data, N = 354,203). The…

Educational achievement is a very important issue for parents, teachers, and the government. An accurate measurement plays a very important role in evaluating achievement fairly, and, therefore, analysis methods have been developed considerably in recent years. Education based on long-time learning processes forms a fruitful base for item tests,…

When comparing data derived from tests or questionnaires in cross-national studies, researchers commonly assume measurement invariance in their underlying scaling models. However, different cultural contexts, languages, and curricula can have powerful effects on how students respond in different countries. This article illustrates how the…

Several current international comparative large-scale assessments of educational achievement (ICLSA) make use of "Rasch models", to address functions essential for valid cross-cultural comparisons. From a historical perspective, ICLSA and Georg Rasch's "models for measurement" emerged at about the same time, half a century ago. However, the…