Increasing linguistic diversity in classrooms has led researchers to examine the validity and fairness of standardized achievement tests, specifically concerning whether test score interpretations are free of bias and score use is fair for all students. This study examined whether mathematics achievement test items that contain complex language…

Development and use of validated assessments in physics provide insight into student understanding of physics concepts and can be utilized to track student learning across time and instructional strategies. These tools can be used to gauge the efficacy of interventions designed to support students and persistence, and allow instructors to make…

The integration of equity into the assessment process is a prevalent topic in higher education with conferences devoting tracks and event themes to this concept. While popular, there has been little research regarding practices that constitute equity-centered assessment. In this piece, the authors provide an argument for integrating equity into…

Celpe-Bras, is the exam for the certification of proficiency in Portuguese as a foreign language. It, is the only Portuguese proficiency test recognized by the Brazilian government (Ministério da Educação, 2013). Given the recent growth of interest and also its unique design as a large-scale proficiency test, this article provides a general…

The Ability Achievement Discrepancy model remains the primary identification method used by school personnel. This study examined identification of a specific learning disability using the Ability Achievement Discrepancy model with the Woodcock-Johnson IV (WJ-IV). Two different test scores can be used to represent the ability construct: one that…

The Every Student Succeeds Act requires that English Learners (ELs) are included in annual state testing (grades 3-8 and once in high school) and included in each state's accountability system disaggregated by subgroup to ensure that they receive the support they need to learn English, participate fully in their education experience, and graduate…

A number of studies have found multiple indicators multiple causes (MIMIC) models to be an effective tool in detecting uniform differential item functioning (DIF) for individual items and item bundles. A recently developed MIMIC-interaction model is capable of detecting both uniform and nonuniform DIF in the unidimensional item response theory…

The theoretical reason for the presence of differential item functioning (DIF) is that data are multidimensional and two groups of examinees differ in their underlying ability distribution for the secondary dimension(s). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine how much the secondary ability distributions must differ before DIF is…

Background: This paper extends a recent study by Kaplan and Su ("J Educ Behav Stat" 41: 51-80, 2016) examining the problem of matrix sampling of context questionnaire scales with respect to the generation of plausible values of cognitive outcomes in large-scale assessments. Methods: Following Weirich et al. ("Nested multiple…

Education starts informally at home and its definition can change person to person. While Tyler defines education as a period of changing one's behavior pattern, Ertürk's explanation is that education is a period of creating intentional desired change in one's behavior by way of own living and Fidan also describes education as a period of managing…

The opt-out movement, a grassroots coalition of opposition to high-stakes tests that are used to sort students, evaluate teachers, and rank schools, has the largest participation on Long Island, New York, where approximately 50% of the eligible students in grades three to eight opted out of the English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics tests in…

The home learning environment (HLE) index is composed of seven questions regarding educational parent-child interactions. To compare the psychometric characteristics of the six items of HLE index between the two different contexts of Germany and Iran, a sample including 468 preschool children from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS),…

This study is part of a larger initiative toward understanding the acculturation of immigrant adolescents using the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England 2004-2010 database. A necessary step in using a database for cross-ethnic comparisons is first to verify whether its items and scales are equivalent. I examined item- and scale-level…

The purpose of this study is to determine whether English test items of Undergraduate Placement Exam (UPE) in 2016 contain differential item functioning (DIF) and differential bundle functioning (DBF) in terms of gender and school type and examine the possible sources of bias of DIF items. Mantel Haenszel (MH), Simultaneous Item Bias Test…

We illustrate the application of mixture IRT [item response theory] models to evaluate the possibility of respondent confusion due to the negative wording of certain items on a social-emotional learning (SEL) assessment. Using actual student self-report ratings on four social-emotional learning scales collected from students in grades 3-12 from…