2011 Issues and Methodologies in Large-Scale Assessment Published

Contact:

• Tom Ewing
  1-609-683-2803
  mediacontacts@ets.org

Princeton, N.J. (October 14, 2011) —

Does a student's home language, gender or social class have an impact on math literacy? Can modern psychometric methodologies help us analyze clustered and complex data sets from international large-scale assessments like the PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study)? These are just two of the questions addressed in a series of research articles featured in the latest volume of Issues and Methodologies in Large-Scale Assessments, published annually by the IEA-ETS Research Institute (IERI) since October 2008.

The monograph contains six papers by leading international experts on large-scale assessment. It is edited by Matthias von Davier, Director of Research at ETS and head of the IERI research unit, and Dirk Hastedt, Co-Director of the IEA Data Processing and Research Center in Hamburg, Germany. The IERI joint research and training institute was founded in 2007 by two of the world's leading educational research organizations: the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and Educational Testing Service (ETS).

"As human capital is seen as an important source of economic growth and social well-being, international large-scale assessments have gained prominence as an important resource to inform educational policy debates," says Irwin Kirsch, Distinguished Presidential Appointee and Director of the Center for Global Assessment at ETS. "The purpose of this publication is to provide a forum through which scientific and methodological issues related to these assessments can be examined."

"This volume raises important issues for the implementation, application and interpretation of large-scale assessments and their data," says Hans Wagemaker, Executive Director of IEA.

Topics in the 2011 issue

Volume 4 features six papers including one by Frank Rijmen, ETS Senior Research Scientist, and another with Yoon Soo Park, Senior Research Manager at ETS, as co-author.

Below is a list of all of the papers in the volume:

• Age distribution and reading achievement configurations among fourth-grade students in PIRLS 2006, by Michael O. Martin, Ina V. S. Mullis, and Pierre Foy
• The influences of home language, gender, and social class on mathematics literacy in France, Germany, Hong Kong, and the United States, by Aminah Perkins, Laura Quaynor, and George Engelhard, Jr.
• Hierarchical factor item response theory models for PIRLS: capturing clustering effects at multiple levels, by Frank Rijmen
• Diagnostic cluster analysis of mathematics skills, by Yoon Soo Park and Young-Sun Lee
• TEDS-M: Diagnosing teacher knowledge by applying multidimensional item response theory and multiple-group models, by Sigrid Blömeke, Richard T. Houang, and Ute Suhl
• PISA test format assessment and the local independence assumption, by Christian Monseur, Ariane Baye, Dominique Lafontaine, and Valérie Quittre

Each paper in the monograph series receives careful evaluation by the IERI Executive Committee, including a blind peer review by experts from ETS and the IEA as well as by external expert reviewers from other international organizations. The papers chosen were consistent with the IERI mission and goals.

Contributions to future monographs in the series are currently being sought from researchers and scholars who share an interest in the advancement and use of large-scale surveys.

The monograph is available for download from the IERI website: http://www.ierinstitute.org/fileadmin/Documents/IERI_Monograph/IERI_Monograph_Volume_04.pdf.

About ETS

At ETS, we advance quality and equity in education for people worldwide by creating assessments based on rigorous research. ETS serves individuals, educational institutions and government agencies by providing customized solutions for teacher certification, English language learning, and elementary, secondary and post-secondary education, as well as conducting education research, analysis and policy studies. Founded as a nonprofit in 1947, ETS develops, administers and scores more than 50 million tests annually — including the TOEFL® and TOEIC® tests, the GRE® tests and The Praxis Series™ assessments — in more than 180 countries, at over 9,000 locations worldwide. www.ets.org