We revisit the empirically observed positive correlation between DIF and difficulty studied by Freedle and commonly seen in tests of verbal proficiency when comparing populations of different mean latent proficiency levels. It is shown that a positive correlation between DIF and difficulty estimates is actually an expected result (absent any true…

The aim of this research is to determine whether students' test performance and approaches to test questions change based on the type of mathematics questions (visual or verbal) administered to them. This research is based on a mixed-design model. The quantitative data are gathered from 297 seventh grade students, attending seven different middle…

This study investigated the relational reasoning capabilities of older adolescents and young adults when the focal assessment was a verbal and more schooled measure than 1 that was figural and more novel in its configuration. To achieve this end, the verbal test of relational reasoning (vTORR) was constructed to parallel the test of relational…

Santelices and Wilson (2010) claimed to have addressed technical criticisms of Freedle (2003) presented in Dorans (2004a) and elsewhere. Santelices and Wilson's abstract claimed that their study confirmed that SAT[R] verbal items do function differently for African American and White subgroups. In this commentary, I demonstrate that the…

In 2003, the "Harvard Educational Review" published a controversial article by Roy Freedle that claimed bias against African American students in the SAT college admissions test. Freedle's work stimulated national media attention and faced an onslaught of criticism from experts at the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the agency…

When a test is adapted from a source language (SL) into a target language (TL), the two forms are usually not psychometrically equivalent. If linking between test forms is necessary, those items that have had their psychometric characteristics altered by the translation (differential item functioning [DIF] items) should be eliminated from the…

An experiment was conducted that contrasted a variant of computerized adaptive testing, self-adapted testing, with two traditional tests. Participants completed a self-report of text anxiety and were randomly assigned to take one of the three tests of verbal ability. Subjects generally chose more difficult items as the test progressed. (Author/LMO)

The dichotomous Rasch model was applied to verbal subtest scores on the Intelligence Structure Test Battery for 905 12- to 15-year-old secondary school students in the Netherlands. Results suggest that, if any factor is used to increase difficulty of items, that factor should be used on all items. (SLD)

Processing of verbal analogies was evaluated by recording eye fixation patterns during solution of problems that represented a broad range of difficulty. Findings on easier problems replicated previous work. On difficult items, high verbal ability individuals adapted processing strategies to a greater extent then did low ability students.…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether it is both possible and cost-effective to revise middle-difficulty Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) discrete items in order to produce items of higher or lower difficulty. The basic procedure was to select items of a given difficulty and, by revising the distractors, make them easier or more…

The first of two studies reported examined the factors that predict differences in item responses for black and white matched examinees to analogies on the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE). Data were taken from 13 forms of the GRE Verbal Test, with a median sample size of 21,000 whites and a median sample size of 1,400 blacks for the purpose of…

To help increase the understanding of sources of difficulty in test items, a study was undertaken to evaluate the effects of various aspects of prose complexity on the difficulty of achievement test items. The items of interest were those that presented a verbal stimulus followed by a question about the stimulus and a standard set of…

The purpose of this study was to identify differentially functioning items on operational administrations of the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) through the use of the Mantel-Haenszel statistic. Retrospective analyses of data collected over 3 years are reported for black/white and female/male comparisons for the Verbal and Quantitative…

Latent trait theory is used as a basis for a definition of item bias, and an experiment is described in which a test of vocabulary items was not found to be biased when administered to two groups of high school students, one group of 58 black students and the other 168 white students. The experiment for the detection of bias began with separate…

Each of the three studies in this report examines a different aspect of the basic question of what the four item types (analogies, antonyms, reading comprehension, and sentence completion) on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) verbal section are measuring and of whether a change in the relative emphasis on the various item types would enhance the…