Educational policies such as Race to the Top in the USA affirm a central role for testing systems in government-driven reform efforts. Such reform policies are often referred to as the global education reform movement (GERM). Changes observed with the GERM style of testing demand socially engaged validity theories that include consequential…

This article reports the first results of a long-term research project focusing on the detection and possible linguistic causes of differential item functioning (DIF) for second generation immigrant students in the Final Test of Primary Education in the Netherlands. The main aim of the project is to provide test constructors with information which…