Culturally responsive (CR) assessments have three major goals: (a) increasing cultural representation in items, (b) fostering cultural competence and antiracist mind-sets in test takers, and (c) more accurately measuring all test takers' abilities. However, limited resources exist in how to create CR items or what CR items could look like.…

Originally designed for students in Grades 3 through 5, MOCCA (formerly the Multiple-choice Online Causal Comprehension Assessment), identifies students who struggle with comprehension, and helps uncover why they struggle. There are many reasons why students might not comprehend what they read. They may struggle with decoding, or reading words…

Three mode comparability studies were conducted on the following Saturday national ACT test dates: October 26, 2019, December 14, 2019, and February 8, 2020. The primary goal of these studies was to evaluate whether ACT scores exhibited mode effects between paper and online testing that would necessitate statistical adjustments to the online…

Children's emergent literacy skills are highly predictive of later reading abilities. To determine which children have weaker emergent literacy skills and are in need of intervention, it is necessary to assess emergent literacy skills accurately and reliably. In this study, 1,351 children were administered the "Revised Get Ready to…

This article investigates several questions regarding the impact of different item formats on measurement characteristics. Constructed response (CR) items and multiple choice (MC) items obviously differ in their formats and in the resources needed to score them. As such, they have been the subject of considerable discussion regarding the impact of…

This article presents a study of ethnic Differential Item Functioning (DIF) for 4th-, 7th-, and 10th-grade reading items on a state criterion-referenced achievement test. The tests, administered 1997 to 2001, were composed of multiple-choice and constructed-response items. Item performance by focal groups (i.e., students from Asian/Pacific Island,…

This research summarizes differential item functioning (DIF) results for student produced response (SPR) items, a nonmultiple-choice mathematical item type in the Scholastic Aptitude Test I (SAT I). DIF data from 4 field trial pretest administrations (620 SPR items) and 10 final forms (100 SPR items with samples ranging from about 58,000 to over…

This report describes three exploratory studies of the performance of males and females on the multiple-choice and constructed-response sections of four Advanced Placement Examinations: United States History, Biology, Chemistry, and English Language and Composition. Analyses were carried out for each racial or ethnic group with a sample size of at…

Guidelines for test item-writing have traditionally recommended making the correct answer of a multiple-choice item grammatically consistent with its stem. To investigate the effects of adhering to this practice, certain item formats were designed to determine whether the practice of providing relevant grammatical clues, in itself, created cue…

A number of hypotheses were tested concerning elements of Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) items that might affect the performance of blacks and whites differently. These elements were characteristics common to several items that otherwise measured different concepts. Seven general hypotheses were tested in the form of sixteen specific…