Brazil's education system lags behind international standards, with two-fifths of students scoring below the minimum level of proficiency in mathematics, science, and reading. Thus, this study combined machine learning with traditional statistics to identify the most important predictors and to interpret their effects on proficiency in the PISA…

One of the primary goals of international large-scale assessments in education is the comparison of country means in student achievement. This article introduces a framework for discussing differential item functioning (DIF) for such mean comparisons. We compare three different linking methods: concurrent scaling based on full invariance,…

The Mantel-Haenszel estimator is one of the most popular techniques for measuring differential item functioning (DIF). A generalization of this estimator is applied to the context of DIF to compare items by taking the covariance of odds ratio estimators between dependent items into account. Unlike the Item Response Theory, the method does not rely…

The goal of this research was to provide a general assessment framework of students' statistical reasoning in medicine, then build three scales to assess students' statistical reasoning ability in solving practical medical problems, including Description, Interpretation and Prediction. On that basis, the study designed a set of tools to assess…

We examined the performance of coefficient alpha and its potential competitors (ordinal alpha, omega total, Revelle's omega total [omega RT], omega hierarchical [omega h], greatest lower bound [GLB], and coefficient "H") with continuous and discrete data having different types of non-normality. Results showed the estimation bias was…

Low test-taking effort as a validity threat is common when examinees perceive an assessment context to have minimal personal value. Prior research has shown that in such contexts, subgroups may differ in their effort, which raises two concerns when making subgroup mean comparisons. First, it is unclear how differential effort could influence…

Research Question: This paper examines the overarching question of to what extent different analytic choices may influence the inference about country-specific cross-sectional and trend estimates in international large-scale assessments. We take data from the assessment of PISA mathematics proficiency from the four rounds from 2003 to 2012 as a…

The purpose of this paper is to briefly introduce two most common applications of multiple group item response theory (IRT) models, namely detecting differential item functioning (DIF) analysis and nonequivalent group score linking with a simultaneous calibration. We illustrate how to conduct those analyses using the "Stata" item…

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) aims to provide comparative data on 15-year-olds' academic performance and well-being. The purpose of the current study is to explore and compare the variables that predict the reading literacy and life satisfaction of U.S. and South Korean students. The random forest algorithm, which is a…