Education Commons^™

A Framework For Predicting Item Difficulty In Reading Tests, Tom Lumley, Alla Routitsky, Juliette Mendelovits, Dara Ramalingam

OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

Results on reading tests are typically reported on scales composed of levels, each giving a statement of student achievement or proficiency. The PISA reading scales provide broad descriptions of skill levels associated with reading items, intended to communicate to policy makers and teachers about the reading proficiency of students at different levels. However, the described scales are not explicitly tied to features that predict difficulty. Difficulty is thus treated as an empirical issue, using a post hoc solution, while a priori estimates of item difficulty have tended to be unreliable. Understanding features influencing the difficulty of reading tasks has the …

Effects Of Item Positions On Their Difficulty And Discrimination : A Study In Pisa Science Data Across Test Language And Countries, Luc T. Le

OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

This study was based on a four-cluster rotation design of 13 linked test booklets from PISA 2006 science data. It investigated effects of item positions on their difficulty and discrimination parameter estimates obtained from one and two parameter IRT Partial Credit models. The analyses were done separately for 57 test language groups from 53 countries with a total of about 340,000 students.

The results revealed that for all of the test language groups the items tended to become more difficult when they were located later in the test. However, a high linear relationship between the item difficulty estimates by the …