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Differential Item Functioning
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Differential Item Functioning

Second Edition


September 2009 | 104 pages | SAGE Publications, Inc
Differential Item Functioning, Second Edition is a revision of the 1983 title Test Item Bias. In the past 23 years, differential item performance has assumed a level of attention unimagined in the early 1980s. Then, only a few tests and assessment programs attended to "item bias," while doing so is now a mandatory step in any responsible assessment program. Also, technical advances, such as the widespread use of item response theory, have pushed the field of differential performance to levels of technical sophistication far beyond what was practiced years ago.

This new edition presents an up-to-date description of DIF; describes varying procedures for addressing DIF in practical testing contexts; presents useful examples and studies of DIF that readers may employ as a guide in their own DIF work; and briefly describes relevant features of major statistical packages that can be employed in DIF analysis (e.g., SPSS, SAS, M+, Minitab, and Systat).

This text is ideal for the measurement professional or advanced student who deals with educational or psychological assessment. Readers need only have a preliminary background in tests and measurement, including some beginning statistics and elementary algebra, in order to find this volume useful.

 
About the Authors
 
Series Editor's Introduction
 
1. Introduction
 
2. Description of DIF
 
3. Statistical Facets of DIF
 
4. Important Considerations
 
5. History of Test Bias and DIF
 
6. Quick-But-Incomplete Methods
 
7. Mantel-Haenszel Procedure
 
8. Nonparametic Methods
 
9. IRT-Based Methods
 
10. Logistic Regression
 
11. Specialized DIF Procedures
 
12. Future Directions
 
Conclusion
 
References
 
Author Index
 
Subject Index

Steven J. Osterlind

Dr. Steven J. Osterlind is Professor of Measurement and Statistics and Director of Educational Psychology program, University of Missouri-Columbia. Dr. Osterlind’s expertise is in psychological assessment, including tests and measurement, statistics, psychometric methods and test development. He received his doctoral degree in 1976 in Educational Psychology (Measurement & Statistics) from the University of Southern California. In 1979, he was an American Scholar’s Fellow at Yale University. At the University of Missouri he teaches graduate-level courses in multivariate statistics, analysis of variance, regression, general linear modeling,... More About Author

Howard T. Everson

Howard T. Everson is currently Professor of Psychology at Fordham University. In addition, he serves as a consulting research scientist to the American Institutes for Research and the American Councils for International Education. Professor Everson's research and scholarly interests focus on the intersection of cognition, instruction, and assessment. He has contributed to developments in educational psychology, psychometrics, and quantitative methods. Before joining the faculty at Fordham University, Dr. Everson was the Executive Director of the NAEP Education Statistics Services Institute at the American Institutes for Research, and is... More About Author

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ISBN: 9781412954945
$42.00

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