Measuring Student Ability, Classifying Schools, and Detecting Item Bias at School Level, Based on Student-Level Dichotomous Items

• Published in: Journal of educational and behavioral statistics Vol. 39; no. 3; pp. 180 - 202
• Main Authors: Bennink, Margot, Croon, Marcel A., Keuning, Jos, Vermunt, Jeroen K.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.06.2014; American Educational Research Association
• Subjects: Academic Ability; Bias; Cognitive ability; Cohort Analysis; Education; Educational administration; Educational Assessment; Educational Testing; Educational tests & measurements; Foreign Countries; Forest reserves; Grade 9; Hierarchical Linear Modeling; High school students; Item Response Theory; Modeling; Multilevel models; Netherlands; Program for International Student Assessment; Small schools; Student Evaluation; Sustainable timber; Teacher evaluations; Test Bias; Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study; Urbanization; Netherlands; multilevel analysis; educational tests; latent variable framework; dichotomous items; school-level processes; item bias
• ISSN: 1076-9986; 1935-1054
• DOI: 10.3102/1076998614529158

In educational measurement, responses of students on items are used not only to measure the ability of students, but also to evaluate and compare the performance of schools. Analysis should ideally account for the multilevel structure of the data, and school-level processes not related to ability, such as working climate and administration conditions, need to be separated from student and school ability. However, in educational studies such as Programme for International Student Assessment, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, and COOL⁵⁻¹⁸, this is hardly ever done. This study presents a model that simultaneously accounts for the nested structure, controls student ability for processes at school level, classifies schools to monitor and compare schools, and tests for school-level item bias.