During the 1980s, considerable attention was given to the influence of "effective" elementary schools on students' school achievement. Effective schools were typically defined as those with certain characteristics that had been found to be positively correlated with student achievement scores. This paper presents findings of a longitudinal study…

Investigations into item bias provide an empirical basis for the identification and elimination of test items which appear to measure different traits across populations or cultural groups. The Psychometric rationales for six approaches to the identification of biased test items are reviewed: (1) Transformed item difficulties: within-group…